I don’t like the clickbait title at all – Mastodon’s clearly going to survive, at least for the forseeable future, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it outlives Xitter.

Still, Mastodon is struggling; most of the people who checkd it out in the November 2022 surge (or the smaller June 2023 surge) didn’t stick around, and numbers have been steadily declining for the last year. The author makes some good points, and some of the comments are excellent.

  • Jupiter Rowland
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    49 months ago

    Decentralisation and having multiple instances isn’t even that much of an issue. 99.999% of all Twitter refugees were railroaded to Mastodon and what seems like 99% of these straight to mastodon.social. They genuinely thought mastodon.social was “the Mastodon website”, just like twitter.com was the Twitter website. It took many of them months to even notice that Mastodon is decentralised. And it took some of them even longer to notice that the Fediverse is, in fact, more than just Mastodon while half of them think that Fediverse = Mastodon after almost two years.

    No, the biggest issue is: What they were looking for was not something radically different from Twitter, now that Twitter sucked. They were looking for a Twitter without Musk. Like, a drop-in replacement that doesn’t require them to adjust in any way. A 1:1, 100% identical clone of Twitter how it was the day before Musk took over with the same UI and the same UX and the same culture.

    When they were railroaded to mastodon.social, they were told that Mastodon is “literally Twitter without Musk”. And they took it as literally. By face value. And then they ended up on something that looked and felt nothing like Twitter. No matter how many of Twitter’s limitations Gargron arbitrarily and unnecessarily implemented into Mastodon, he never got close enough to Twitter itself.

    People would stick around because Mastodon felt like the only alternative to Twitter there was. Of course, they kept using Mastodon exactly like Twitter, not adopting to Mastodon’s culture and relying on their toots being delivered to people by an algorithm that Mastodon simply doesn’t have. Hashtag? Fuck hashtags, I didn’t need no hashtags on Twitter, so I ain’t gonna use none on Mastodon. And then they wondered why so few people discovered them and their content.

    They didn’t want to adapt. They were waiting for Mastodon to finally “fix the bugs” that made it different from Twitter. Which it didn’t.

    Instead, Mastodon developed its own culture (which is a story of its own). And they were pressured to adopt Mastodon’s culture. CWs for sensitive content for any definition of “sensitive”. Twitter ain’t got no CW field. Alt-texts for all images, and it had to be actually useful and informative. They ain’t never done no alt-texts on Twitter. Of course, the right hashtags. See above.

    Also, Mastodon-the-app is lack-lustre. Whereas the official apps for just about everything else are fully-featured, the Mastodon mobile app is only there for there to be a mobile app named “Mastodon” for those people who join a new online service by grabbing their iPhones and loading the app with the same name as the service from the App Store. Especially newbies often can’t wrap their minds around using an online service with an app that doesn’t have the same name. But the official Mastodon app is actually just about the worst Mastodon app out there. At the same time, for many Mastodon users, this app IS Mastodon. They’ve never seen the Web interface. What the app can’t do, Mastodon can’t do.

    Lastly, Mastodon was probably also way too techy. Like, you had people talking about Linux and Open Source and Web design and whatnot all over the place, something that they themselves knew nothing about and weren’t interested in. On top came those people with their weird-looking monster posts that said the Fediverse is not only Mastodon, and they were posting from something that is not and has never even been affiliated with Mastodon.

    And then Bluesky came along. And Bluesky looked exactly like what they’ve been wanting all the time: a 1:1 Twitter clone. One big reason for Bluesky’s success is that it shamelessly ripped off the UI of immediately-pre-Musk-takeover Twitter, both the website and the mobile app. A fully-featured, well-polished mobile app with all the same features as the website. And at first glance, it feels like the same monolithic walled-garden silo as Twitter with the same kinds of users as Twitter, minus the Nazis. At least not as ripe with übergeeks as Mastodon.

    Also, Bluesky grew faster and quickly had more users than Mastodon. Which sounded like more followers in less time. Exactly what all those famewhores that brag about their Twitter follower counts were craving.

    People wanted a pre-Musk Twitter clone. Mastodon isn’t one. Everything else in the Fediverse is one even less. Bluesky is just that. Bluesky is what people had wanted all the time.

    • @[email protected]
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      39 months ago

      So… This is stalkerish, but I was curious about your dark/gothic interests and I read some of your comments and you seem like an interesting person. I’d be grateful if you could share your poetry (a link to your accounts or whatever medium). 😳 Sorry; thank you.

    • @[email protected]
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      39 months ago

      I never really got into Twitter format. Been more of a fan of long form discussion that can bring more insight. Mastodon and bluesky just fill that void, although has replaced twitter for me.

  • @[email protected]
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    19 months ago

    I think people are tired of the 140 character type social networks, the novelty has simply worn off. It’s either self-promotion or “I had two eggs for breakfast lol” type of posts.

    People who came to Mastodon, posted “Hello world!” and didn’t bother to set a profile picture or add a description will always complain about the lack of discoverability, or the place being boring.

    You literally have to put in work to set up your feed, follow hashtags, people and post yourself for it to be a network and not just a feed of things. And I think people struggle with this concept a lot.

    I do understand that it’s not for everyone. But it’s not a problem with Mastodon, it’s just a natural filter IMO. “You have to put at least this much effort to integrate”. Low-effort things are usually just rage-bait.

  • @[email protected]
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    9 months ago

    Because Threads and BlueSky form effective competition with Twitter.

    Also, short form content with just a few sentences per post sucks. It’s become obvious. That Twitter was mostly algorithm hype and FOMO.

    Mastodon tries to be healthier but I’m not convinced that microblogs in general are that useful, especially to a techie audience who knows RSS and other publishing formats.

    • The Nexus of PrivacyOP
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      39 months ago

      Bluesky certainly provides another option … when Apartheid Clyde led to Twitter getting shut down in Brazil, there was a small bump in Mastodon’s numbers, but a much bigger influx to Bluesky. Then again Bluesky’s addressed a lot of problems people coming to Mastodon in 2022 had, and Mastodon hasn’t, so if everybody had come to Mastodon instead the pattern would likely have repeated itself and most of them wouldn’t have stuck around.

      • Otter
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        19 months ago

        What are some of the issues you’d like to see addressed? I don’t use mastodon as much so I’m not familiar with what has / hasn’t been done.

        ex. I hear they’ve been working on content discovery, such as with the recommended accounts carousel

        • The Nexus of PrivacyOP
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          49 months ago

          https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt is a good overview (not by me!) of issues that the November 2022 wave ran into. What’s frustrating is that so many of these are very similar to the issues the April 2017 wave ran into!

          Release 4.3 did some work on the recommended accounts, that’s good, but the problems start even before that. What instance to sign up to? Most people have better experiences on smaller instances that match either their interests or their geography … but how to find them? mastodon.social is (for most people) kind of meh – certainly not the worst, but it’s not all that well-moderated, and it’s big enough that the local feed isn’t useful for finding interesting people or stuff – and that’s now the default. Also it took over a year to get 4.3 out; I get it, they’re a small team, some stuff turned out to be a lot harder than expected, and they had to deal with a bunch of security patches in the interim … still, that means progress is frustratingly slow.

          • AlexisFR
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            19 months ago

            The fact that like an rethreads are not federated is I pretty big issue. Like if you come from a small instance, you’ll see most global posts at 0 likes, which makes the platform look dead.

    • @[email protected]
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      19 months ago

      Also, short form content with just a few sentences per post sucks

      Your post could fit on Mastodon

      • @[email protected]
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        9 months ago

        My post above is 376 characters, which would have required three tweets under the original 140 character limit.

        Mastodon, for better or worse, has captured a bunch of people who are hooked on the original super-short posting style, which I feel is a form of Newspeak / 1984-style dumbing down of language and discussion that removed nuance. Yes, Mastodon has removed the limit and we have better abilities to discuss today, but that doesn’t change the years of training (erm… untraining?) we need to do to de-program people off of this toxic style.

        Especially when Mastodon is trying to cater to people who are used to tweets.

        Your post could fit on Mastodon

        EDIT: and second, Mastodon doesn’t have the toxic-FOMO effect that hooks people into Twitter (or Threads, or Bluesky).

        People post not because short sentences are good. They post and doom-scroll because they don’t want to feel left out of something. Mastodon is healthier for you, but also less intoxicating / less pushy. Its somewhat doomed to failure, as the very point of these short posts / short-engagement stuff is basically crowd manipulation, FOMO and algorithmic manipulation.

        Without that kind of manipulation, we won’t get the kinds of engagement on Mastodon (or Lemmy for that matter).

        • Dame
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          19 months ago

          How is mastodon healthier? Please provide examples. Healthier for whom? As there’s an extensive list of people harmed that absolutely do not find mastodon “healthy” let alone “healthier” particularly Black and Brown folks. Bluesky defaults to the same way feeds are presented as Mastodon does, so your statement is false

        • @[email protected]
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          19 months ago

          Look I love lemmy/reddit style social networks and I don’t disagree with the shallow reasons for why twitter has a character limit but there are legitimate and interesting reasons for character limits to posts. Is it better? probably not but sometimes less is more.

    • @[email protected]
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      19 months ago

      They are in competition with Mastodon, and have a marketing budget.

      Five years from now, those platforms will become enshittified as their budgets dry up. They will need to milk the users for revenue. Well see another surge in a few years, until they learn that Mastodon is actually better.

      • @[email protected]
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        19 months ago

        Then the next Billionaire with a massive ego and huge budget comes out and makes another one.

        Or we get Jack Dorsey making a new company for a 3rd time.

  • @[email protected]
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    9 months ago

    i posted in another thread how i think content discovery stinks on mastodon. bluesky is much better at it. mastodon feeds are a wall of noise

  • patrick
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    29 months ago

    On the feature side, according to Mastodons recent 4.3 release post development is only 4 full time employees and a budget of under $500k annually. That is basically nothing in the realm of social media companies.

    Improving Mastodons features requires money and resources, but Mastodons users are unwilling to pay for instances and unwillingly to fund development. Hell, the .world folks host a bunch of instances for collectively hundreds of thousands of users and they take in about $1k a month in donations. I’m surprised that even covers hosting costs.

    So…it’s no wonder that it isn’t going to be as polished as other social media in ways that would reduce the attrition.

  • @[email protected]
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    69 months ago

    Mastodon has a horrible UI and UX, at least in my opinion. I’ve found Misskey and its forks to be better.

  • @[email protected]
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    9 months ago

    I’ll throw my -opinion- in the ring here because no one else is saying it the same way.

    • Echoing what other people said, finding a server was hard especially as at the time I thought defederating seemed stupid (changed my mind somewhat now that I use Lemmy). Then once signed up discovery was/is a pain. How do I find good accounts when they aren’t synced with the instance I am on? Fuck if I know, I never found an equivalent to lemmyverse.net for mastodon.
    • Now into the big problem I had: federation was a pain. It was my first interaction with a federated service that isn’t email and it was confusing and annoying. Finally find an account you like? Well you either can’t see any of their posts or the few you can have 1 reply and 5 likes. Eventually you realise you have to click onto the account’s instance to see everything and they have 100 replies and 500 likes (made-up numbers, obviously) but guess what you can’t interact with any of them because you are no longer on your instance. It basically forced me to browse logged out for 99% of my browsing, constantly following links between websites. I have not had quite the same trouble with Lemmy because despite having some similar problems, it has been a LOT quicker to sync especially once you point your instance to another.
    • The lack of algorithm or fine control of my feed was off-putting. I still hate that Facebook and other platforms make it hard or impossible to sort chronologically, but having only chronological makes for a potential to miss out on massive amounts of stuff.
    • And on a personal note, I think I’m just falling out of favour with the idea of a microblogging platform with strangers. If my friends used it things might be different.

    I did try out Firefish and enjoyed that way more as it had a fun and engaging UI and lots of extra features, but it holds the same federation and discovery issues.

    • @[email protected]
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      9 months ago

      Then once signed up discovery was/is a pain. How do I find good accounts when they aren’t synced with the instance I am on? Fuck if I know, I never found an equivalent to lemmyverse.net for mastodon.

      Feels like the A.1 issue of Mastadon as a platform. If person A on instance Q wants to follow person B on instance R, there’s no straight line easy path to do that. Compared to Twitter or BlueSky or Threads, where its all one ecosystem and you just say “I’d like to follow @LieutenantDickweasel” and now you’ve got their posts in your stream, Mastadon is byzantine and not worth the effort to explore.

      On the flip side, Truth Social is a Mastadon instance, and it’s trading with a market cap of several billion dollars. Seems successful enough to me.

      I think I’m just falling out of favour with the idea of a microblogging platform with strangers

      Generally speaking, you’re not on these services to follow strangers per say. You’re on there to interact with D-list celebrities and other highly niche personalities. Or you’re on the system to self-promote and become a D-list celebrity/niche personality. Webcomics artists, semi-famous musicians, podcasters, and political bloggers are all over my feed. I’d never talk to these people IRL. And I’d never interact with them if they were even slightly more popular or famous. But in this space, its a cozy little “oh let’s check in on what the author of AtomicRobo Comics is up to?” fan relationship that’s fruitful and fun for everyone involved.

      But Mastadon is shit at putting indie fans in touch with their focus of attention. After that, what am I using this for other than a stripped-down Discord or glorified group-SMS? Pointless.

      One reason why Truth Social was able to work stemmed from the fact that it was a single magnetizing D-list celebrity that drew people in. But even then, you’re talking about an audience in the… thousands? Even as a one-stop shop for all things Donald Trump, it’s low energy and lame when compared to Twitter.

  • @[email protected]
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    59 months ago

    It’s not dead but it has one big and massive issue that prevents mass adoption - discovery. If I can’t just write the name of my friends in search and find them no matter where they made their account - for an ordinary user, or one that comes from centralized services, this seems extremely alien and hostile.

    And in the end, if you can’t find your friends, you want to interact with, what is the point of using the service?

    Luckily, Mastodon is working on a discorvery protocol that should offer a way to find people across the board, which will hopefully make the Fediverse “appear” centralized to the average Joe while maintaining all the benefits of decentralization to the advanced users.

    • @[email protected]
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      19 months ago

      Problem: even with discovery, if your friends are on Threads or X, you still won’t find them on Mastodon. But its a step in the right direction.

      • xigoi
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        19 months ago

        You would be able to find them if every instance didn’t decide to defederate with Threads.

      • @[email protected]
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        29 months ago

        Unless you can follow specific people on blocked instances, this is a fail. If my friend is on another instance which is blocked from my instance… whats the point of the fediverse? Might aswell go back to Facebook or X/Twitter. They are shitty but at least I can see my friends.

    • Jupiter Rowland
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      29 months ago

      Luckily, Mastodon is working on a discorvery protocol that should offer a way to find people across the board, which will hopefully make the Fediverse “appear” centralized to the average Joe while maintaining all the benefits of decentralization to the advanced users.

      I’d bet that this will be so proprietary and non-standard again that it’ll only work within Mastodon, maybe plus a few of its own soft-forks, effectively ignoring 30% of the Fediverse.

    • @[email protected]
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      09 months ago

      I don’t understand. Mastodon has implemented global search a while ago. If I type “Steve” in the search bar, I get Steves from all sorts of places, not only from my instance.

      Or are you talking about some sort of “contacts scan” implementation?

    • JoJo
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      49 months ago

      You can put in their handle, with the domain they’ve signed up with

      If you’re looking for more wider fuzzy search for that; mastodon 4.4 is gonna implement independent search services, meaning that search will be expanded beyond one server, and you can find new accounts on other servers just by keywords

      • @[email protected]
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        19 months ago

        I don’t know or need to know the handle. I know my friends name and surname and that must be more than enough. Facebook doesn’t need “@facebook” and twitter doesn’t need “@twitter” to find people if they exist there. I know the feature is coming but it is the key to make it accessible to wide range of average Joes who don’t want to, in their own vision, be rocket scientists to find people on the fediverse. It needs to be as simple as on facebook or other networks.

        • JoJo
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          09 months ago

          I know my friends name and surname and that must be more than enough.

          I see. However; no.

  • @[email protected]
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    29 months ago

    Because it doesn’t have $100s of millions to throw at marketing, or the name dropping of Twitter creators behind it.

    It is what it is. You can either be alright with being small, or hurl money into it, but the people who hurl money into things tend to want it back at some point, and that means becoming a shitty business.

  • @[email protected]
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    39 months ago

    I’ll say it again, the name sucks. It’s not cute, it sounds like mastrubate compared to twitter, it just is not catchy.

    TicTic, snapchat, the apps that make it have a stupid catchy name, mastadon ain’t it.

    • Jupiter Rowland
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      29 months ago

      Mastodon wasn’t launched by a VC-backed Silicon Valley startup to become the phone app that replaces Twitter.

      It was created by a German high school graduate and metalhead all alone as not much more than StatusNet with a different UI and some features cut for simplicity. It was designed by a nerd for nerds, nerds who didn’t rely on phone apps for everything. At this level, and back in 2016, not even an official native iPhone app was mandatory.

    • @[email protected]
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      39 months ago

      Twitter really isn’t that much better. I remember when Twitter first started and it was getting a lot of crap for its weird name and that you made tweets. It count on eventually, but it’s going to take constant exposure.

  • @[email protected]
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    9 months ago

    I agree with top comment.

    I’m Indonesian. Most of trending fediverse are Western related topics which It’s not relevant to me.

    There’s one time when I randomly post about my country politics, and people on Mastodon just assume or comment using Western mindset.

    Other than this Lemmy account, I mostly stick with hobby-related fediverse that mostly East Asian and Southeast Asian people (mostly Misskey instance)

    Also, Indonesian is currently the highest user on Twitter, recently bypassed Brazil. People still use it as our local feed is… well localized. No Western-related discussion and much more comfy.

    • The Nexus of PrivacyOP
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      19 months ago

      That was a great comment. It’s frustrating because the fediverse should be good at making it easy for people to find topics their interested in … but it doesn’t work out that way in practice.

  • @[email protected]
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    39 months ago

    Mastodon is pretty different to its competitors. It looks similar to Twitter / Bluesky, but the way the social network functions is completely different.

    It’s designed to be anti-infuencer… One of the things I hate about most social media platforms is a few people get all the attention. There are a few reasons for this, but it’s not really based on merit.

    I think a lot of people joined Mastodon wanting a Twitter clone. It’s obviously not and Bluesky is, so people moved there. The approach Mastodon takes is far from perfect, and may not work out in the long run. But it seems like it’s worth at least trying something different.

  • @[email protected]
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    29 months ago

    Personally, I just don’t enjoy that Twitter-like format. I never used Twitter so I find it… Awkward? To me its kinda like a platformer with bad controls, everything else about the game might be great but if it doesnt feel satisfying to play, I’ll skip.

    I still have my account and Megalodon on my phone but I just can’t get into it.

    • @[email protected]
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      19 months ago

      I’m with you on the Twitter style format. Reddit / Lemmy is nice because you can have actual conversations. Twitter you are basically shouting into the void and sometimes it shouts back.

      • Captain Aggravated
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        19 months ago

        That format was pretty good for “Come see us live at the Sodbury Theatre in Glurpfortshire, Feb 32nd @9PM!”

        I remember an instance where a Cracked.com article pointed out something like “5 creepy places on the internet” one of which was a dicussion forum in which one account was posting over and over, many times a day, about public appearances and such of the cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and readers showed up en masse to harass this person. Turns out she was off-label using a forum engine as her own little microtwitter to publish alerts to a fan club. But when the Cracked author rejected that context and substituted his own, it smelled a lot like Humanbeing151.

        But yes in general I find discussion boards to be more useful; I think it’s why they were invented first; Reddit and Lemmy are basically just different approaches to implementing Usenet.