It also feels like one place that can just keep going. With BlueSky, I know they're going to need to find a business model to cover the $36M worth of VC they've taken, many millions in salaries and hardware costs they've paid out, and provide a healthy return for all that risk.
Mastodon feels like a better version of the early days of the internet. Not everything is perfect, but it's a bunch of people running stuff for themselves and their communities. Now even giant universities with tens of thousands of students outsource their email systems to Microsoft or Google. Most content is going through three companies (ByteDance, Meta, Google) with ByteDance being the "tiny" player at an estimated $300B value (tiny compared to the $1.5B of Meta and $3.4B of Google).
Mastodon/ActivityPub stands against that. It lets everyone have their own little piece of the internet and get and send feed updates to each other. No one dominates the network so much that there's a risk of them cutting off the rest. Mastodon gGmbH is a non-profit.
It feels like it can have longevity in a world where I'm always waiting for the enshittification to be turned on. One of the reasons I love Wikipedia is because it feels like a breath of fresh air on an internet that's always trying to make a quick buck, influence me, etc. Mastodon similarly feels like a breath of fresh air.
$300M? Or $1.5T? Because $300B isn't tiny compared to $1.5B.
Mastodon doesn't have an "algorithm" (in the online recommendation sense).
Every post is sorted by post date, which biases against virality.
Influencers don't go on mastodon because they can't "go viral". They can't spew dramaslop or whatever other psychological trickery to gain a greater reach.
Mastodon isn't built for influencers, it's built against them.
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It's also not growth-hacking to a reach critical mass usage before rug-pulling its users into a pit of every expanding service enshitification.
That's what makes it feel so much more authentic compared to other social networks.
It's the social media network from a parallel universe where the non-profit Wikipedia/Wikimedia purchased Twitter and Discord, merged them together then got rid of the mic rooms.
Many influencers have patreon and are keen to attract more funding. Many could maintain mastodon in addition to other platforms.
Influencer's approach to posting tends to be the "shotgun" / "throw shit at a wall and see what sticks" approach.
Since Mastodon only sorts by date and not by popularity/virality, anyone who follows those influencers are going to get spammed by every single one of their posts.
Mastodon users have a simple solution for dealing with spam, they unfollow that person.
I did some random sampling and it looks like large number of active users are talking to void and may not have realized it. They post regularly, have 100s of followers but no active followers.
The most popular servers like mastodon.social are cesspools of snark, anger and grandstanding. Oh, and the moderation is random/nonexistent depending on the day.
This is true on Twitter/X or any social network like it.
The "problem" is that the European WWW didn't like the content that works(and I'd argue same applies to Twitter of now). If you don't like the content that works, you get little to no real content or users.
The community is so "conforming" on certain topics that you will rarely find different opinions and those get flagged etc. I was in one of the main instances, and I noticed a change at the end (like when a tiny 1% becomes 1.1% and then 1.2%, or let's say more outspoken, but it wasn't enough) before I decided not to be there anymore.
About the influencers: They are there too, it's just different how it works. But one way or another I always stumbled upon their posts, although I really disliked them because they basically foster that bubble. They are just there to be the first in a less saturated market, like the first influencers of YouTube or so. And while you believe they are not there to influence you, watching the same crap every day passively influences you, even if you don't feel it.
This made me go "back" to X, whose main issue is for me the huge amount of bots or repetitive content, which you cannot just fight with manual tooling.
And X made me go back to no social media, except for time to time to see fun stuff or (very likely) unrealistic videos. Which is ok sometimes to decompress a bit.
So in a way I have to thank Mastodon for making me see that I am just not cut out for social media.