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OK, here's the problem in a nutshell: no one among regular people cares. You guys are splitting hairs right now when talking about the difference between tweeti

OK, here's the problem in a nutshell: no one among regular people cares. You guys are splitting hairs right now when talking about the difference between tweeting and boosting or public companies vs open source or what have you. None of that attracts users. If you have no users, then for regular people, your product is useless. Even the article is not really making a pitch for mastodon that indicates any features at all that would convince any of Kim K or Kylie Jenner's followers to go take a look at it. I'll even go a step further and say that Mastodon is probably more for fringe groups than for the unwashed masses those fringe groups are trying to influence. Look, you want me to get excited about Mastodon? Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter, instagram, or Snapchat. Is there some triple-I indie game that Mastodon will allow me to play in my browser? (Or triple-A non indie? I'm not picky. Just don't show me a point and click please.) Post the link for that game, you'll get a lot more people trying Mastodon. Alternatively, is there some new and novel porn that Mastodon will allow me to access? Or is there a new generation of FIFA stars on Mastodon? Or new generation of NBA stars? I mean, even a new generation of "It" Girls chasing NBA stars would be better for attracting users than "thoughtful and local uncommented retweets". Which is not only what you're asking me to get excited about right now, but is likely not even true. Boosts will be no more thoughtful than retweets, likely a good deal less thoughtful since Mastodon seems to be on a road that relegates it to fringe groups. Right now, it's like buying a large tract of land in Kansas and saying that you've started a new municipality. No we don't have beaches, or theaters, or parks, or much of anything else, but everyone here is more thoughtful. so we're much better than Miami, San Diego, or Minneapolis. I mean, it might work? But I think Las Vegas hit on a much better method of populating empty area by just saying, "HEY! We've got gambling and naked women!"

TillE 8y ago
You say problem, I say advantage. Not everything has to be a massive public square! It's okay to be niche. Until the mid/late 2000s, the internet was far more decentralized and often much the better for it. In other words: https://mastodon.social/@helldude/100572161034726032 https://mastodon.social/@helldude/100572161034726032
- philippz 8y ago
  "You say problem, I say advantage." - What are you aiming for then? What is the whole point of that "elevator pitch" if not getting more attention for and grow it so it's not that niche anymore?
  - maxsilver 8y ago
    > What is the whole point of that "elevator pitch" if not getting more attention for and grow it so it's not that niche anymore? I think the idea is that they want to use their unique design to grow lots more niches, not make any one niche bigger. If Twitter is like Times Square, Mastodon is like Kansas City's town square. Mastodon's plan seems not to grow Kansas City into a Times Square sized competitor -- their plan seems to be to grow 1,000 more new-but-different Kansas City sized town squares. At least, that's the impression I'm getting from reading the third and fourth header's paragraphs.
- Rjevski 8y ago
  The internet and a social network are two different things. The internet doesn’t necessarily need everyone to be on it to be successful. The whole point of a social network is that the majority of people are on it. That’s why Facebook is still successful despite being an absolute dump. I don’t care about the technicalities, open source, etc (and I say that as a software engineer). I care about being able to lookup the person I just met at the bar and add/follow them. Until Mastodon can achieve that, I won’t care about it.
  - pmyteh 8y ago
    The large majority of people aren't on Twitter, FWIW. Every social media platform except possibly Facebook is globally niche, and most are locally niche too.
    - adventured 8y ago
      Twitter isn't niche when it comes to what matters the most for their platform: having all the most important attention getting users on there. It's dominant. Even Instagram doesn't have what Twitter does on that front. Twitter has an immense collection of people that particularly matter in their given field, interesting famous people, and so on: celebrities, journalists, media personalities, musicians, authors, politicians, athletes, techies, companies, bankers, VCs, CEOs, entrepreneurs, famous bloggers and gamers, fashion people, etc. Twitter has an extremely dense, active collection of those people. You can say that you don't personally care about that, however the majority of people very clearly do (and always will).
teaneedz 8y ago
I think you nailed the USP of Mastodon. Keeping out the marketers, advertisers, vanity metric chasing or fandom makes Mastodon that peaceful scenic beach where your fellow beach goers say hello and share some of their food with you. I'll take Mastodon fringe over obnoxious Twitter or Facebook anytime.
- thevardanian 8y ago
  People often forget that at the beginning none of the current giants were "mainstream", in fact what made them attractive was the fact that they had a unique audience that formed a strong community amongst each other. The idea of "mainstream" is dying, and will continue to do so. What we're seeing is a deep cultural fracture where communities, ideas, and people do not form the kind of stardom or centralized propagation of ideas that the previous decades were known by. As production gets cheaper, and getting an audience becomes easier, people will begin to form seamless self-sustained communities that support each other (think patreon). If video killed the radio star, then the internet killed the star, and fractured it into infinite pieces.
  - extradego 8y ago
    You read it here. It's hard to see how this is the future without experiencing it in some way personally. Facebook Groups connected me with fans of a particular kind of fringe art about 4 years ago and made leaving Facebook really difficult. This might seem exceedingly anecdotal, and I get that, but you have to realize that, before Facebook, it would have been impossible for any of us to even know this interest existed; much less that there were others also into it. Nothing in the cultural canon quite sufficed, although some trends in music and literature had come close, none of them quite articulated the thing. Finding the thing was a necessary part of a certain stage of my life, and gave me a psychological grounding that something mainstream might never could have. I think admitting so actually devalues the spectacle in question, but I can't deny it. There was a value in the fact that this small group of people spoke this unique language. We became something like a tribe. Attention economics are strange and only beginning to define our lives. Younger people will depend on fringe engagements to achieve a sense of self-identity that used to be a given. Life experience is going to take a new shape accordingly. I think early evidence of this is in music scenes, which is haphazardly often the case with forms of sociocultural influence. No conventional wisdom can explain the proliferation of indie music and things like tape labels but these things are massive forces. They just genuinely don't care what you think. They have an audience and it's up to you to be a part. Mastadon is strangely ahead of the curve and probably doing a poor job of meeting in the middle. I think it would benefit from shoving everyone into Mastadon.social at signup and letting them learn about instances from there. Finding a home is too difficult as it is. But, eventually, it does look like the future.
ohtwenty 8y ago
>Look, you want me to get excited about Mastodon? Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with[…] Have a healthy conversation? I know some people who stopped or reduced social media usage because that was pretty much impossible. Plus the local feed thing. Start an instance for your neighbourhood, follow people who are on there, and you've got all the neighbourhoodly gossip on there. Whilst still being able to follow whoever else you want (except Wil Wheaton because he went to a non-federated instance)
- urtrs 8y ago
  Last time I tried mastodon it was really difficult to find any quality content. Search was mostly unusable and local timeline was full of jokes and things that did not matter to me at all.
  - ohtwenty 8y ago
    Fair enough. The current influx has made this worse (lots of metaposting about joining mastodon), but that depends on who/what you're looking for. Try another instance, maybe? That might be the greatest onboarding weakness, that if you settle on an instance that you don't like it kind of ruins the experience
randomsearch 8y ago
To summarise what you've said in one sentence: "mastodon is a technology, not a product" - it doesn't have a business model, a way to scale and grow like a business. And if it did, well it'd be just another commercial social network, and most of them completely suck. Technology is not the solution to this problem.
- randomsearch 8y ago
  Further: I just looked at Mastodon.social. No, my non-nerd friends do not wish to "Join the Federation!" Not to knock what Mastodon are doing, rather to criticise the idea that it's a social network for everyone.
- codesections 8y ago
  > "mastodon is a technology, not a product" - it doesn't have a business model, a way to scale and grow like a business. I'd agree with 2/3rds of that. Mastodon is a technology, not a product, and it doesn't have a business model. But that does not mean that it can't scale and grow—it means that it doesn't have any way to turn scaling and growing into money. email is a technology; javascript is a technology, the microchip is a technology. All of those technologies have seen tremendous growth, and none of them have made money (though products using them certainly have). I suspect that, if Mastodon grows, it will be precisely because it is a technology, not a product. Making money isn't the only way to grow.
codesections 8y ago
> Look, you want me to get excited about Mastodon? Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter I don't think the advantage for Mastodon is being able to do anything that Twitter can't. Instead, it's being able to do everything that Twitter can without a lot of the negatives that come with Twitter. My view is that, fundamentally, Twitter is a good platform, but it suffers from a number of toxic elements (dog piles, turning everything into angry politics, new "features" designed to increase engagement/number of ads you see, etc.). I'm guessing that "Twitter, but without everything you hate about Twitter" is enough to overcome the network effects, especially as Twitter keeps finding new ways to annoy its users for money. But maybe I'm wrong about that. I guess we'll see.
- Exuma 8y ago
  What he's saying is that's not a good enough reason to switch. Regular users simply do not care about any of that, and that's where 90% of your base comes from.
  - majewsky 8y ago
    I disagree with the argument though. By the same line of reasoning, you could have said in 1997 that Amazon is not a compelling idea because you can already buy books elsewhere. But Amazon allowed you to buy books without the hassle of going to the store. So, without making any predictions about Mastodon, I think that "like X, without the things that make X annoying" is a reasonable pitch if executed correctly.
    - Exuma 8y ago
      Comparing buying books online vs at a physical location isn't even in the same universe as retweeting something but without a message attatched
    - elm-tree- 8y ago
      Amazon made it easier to get books; you no longer need to leave your house. What does Mastadon make easier?
znpy 8y ago
Meh. I see your points, they are all valid and true. Mastodon might "win" just because it'll keep working after Twitter finally dies.
- WilliamEdward 8y ago
  You put a lot of trust into twitter dying, but don't seem to concede that inertia is a gigantic part of what holds twitter above water. Users are already too well established on twitter to leave even in the worst of times (see: facebook incidents), meaning I'm quite doubtful it will die in our entire lifetime let alone soon. Social networks haven't been around long enough to be able to tell whether dying is actually even possible for them.
tomohawk 8y ago
The big social media sites are in the process of evicting everyone who doesn't 100% agree with them. We've seen this kind of thing in history before, and the one thing we know about it is that it is a process without end. Once one group gets removed, another group becomes the outlier, and they become the next target, and so on. Heck, they're already banning political ads from mainstream candidates for US Congress. This creates a demand for alternatives. Once a community moves to a system like Mastodon, that creates a demand for that system. No one cares about myspace anymore. In 10 years, noone will care about twitter. That's the nature of technology.
- that_jojo 8y ago
  And right at this moment, no one gives a shit about Mastodon.
  - DaiPlusPlus 8y ago
    Myself and many of my followers and the people that I follow are suddenly starting to adopt Mastodon, especially with clients that cross-post to both Twitter and Mastodon - because we just don’t like the official Twitter client and are unhappy with Twitter’s recent killing-off of third-party clients.
    - branchless 8y ago
      Can I use a mastedon client to view Twitter? I guess not as the API is the blocker.
  - papaf 8y ago
    I remember when the www was the same and the CompuServe users said the same thing. Mastodon has a similar feel in that the content is amateurish and free. As an anecdote, I use chaos.social and they are throttling signups because there are too many new signups. Maybe you will be surprised.
    - s73v3r_ 8y ago
gfodor 8y ago
You realize similar dissmissiveness was levied against Twitter before it took off. It's hard to predict the fate of social networks.
teleclimber 8y ago
> Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter, instagram, or Snapchat. You can communicate with anything that supports ActivityPub. That means that you can get RSS-like feeds of blogs in your Mastodon timeline, or use Masto or any other AP-supporting platform to comment on a blog post (if it supports AP for that). I find that exciting: your self-hosted personal site can now be just as much a part of the social network as something that was posted natively. It's very much a work in progress but the promise of Mastodon is not so much replacing Twitter as it is a gateway to an internet-wide social graph with no walls.
- twblalock 8y ago
  Regular people do not self-host websites or know what RSS is. What does Mastodon offer that regular people care about?
  - Barrin92 8y ago
    significantly less toxicity and content they don't want to see in the first place. Twitter is like standing in the centre of a crowded mall on a hot summer day. Mastodon is a small friendly pub. I guess what it offers them is social media that actually maintains your peace of mind to a degree.
    - teaneedz 8y ago
      Spot on. I left Twitter (well left an auto bot behind) and took my live posts to Mastodon. It's so much more relaxing with masto.
    - ivan_gammel 8y ago
      Open anarchic communities are not toxic only while they are young and fresh. Eventually they will grow and either establish a set of formal and legally binding ceremonies with unsatisfactory result (actually I don't know any really good decentralized example here - Wikipedia is the closest one) or become toxic and die (IRC).
radus 8y ago
Personally I'm looking at using this with my small network of friends and family and could care less whether or not Kim K joins. What you can do here (and with other similar applications) is share things with your friends without ads and without your data being owned and sold by a corporation.
- davidcbc 8y ago
  Only if all my friends and family are on it, and they'll want all their friends and family on it, and they'll want their friends and family... etc... It's like the value of a social media platform is in lots of people being on it
qznc 8y ago
Has anybody tried business models on top of Mastodon/ActivityPub? For example, a premium instance. Costs 100$ per month. Gives you 24/7 phone support, a free iPhone X, and the opportunity to toot exclusively to other premium users.
- codesections 8y ago
  This might not be quite what you described, but masto.host is a hosting provider that specializes in providing managed hosting for Mastodon instances (and they charge way less than $100/month!)
Karrot_Kream 8y ago
By that logic, what did Facebook offer that MySpace didn't? What did MySpace offer that a forum didn't? What did all of these provide that a lot newspaper didn't? A lot of these platforms brought things to the table that weren't direct product features. People are motivated by more than features, though a lot of tech people seem to feel otherwise.
yahnusername 8y ago
I miss the old internet when we trusted each other enough to trade star wars cards by posting on forums and exchanging mailing addresses. If I tried to do that on today's internet I'd have a SWAT team show up to murder me. And not even because my star wars trades are bad, but because of my support of women's rights. When you have One Thing For Everything, all the wires get crossed. It sucks. The place where the people AREN'T and the kylie jenners AREN'T is a perk of mastodon to some, not a flaw. It's like the tech nerd version of kids not using facebook because it's their parents' social network. I just want to share cool pictures of my modular origami and not constantly be two degrees of separation from Trump's latest outrage
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
davepeck 8y ago
> Look, you want me to get excited about Mastodon? Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter, instagram, or Snapchat. This, again and again. (And again; it seems I can’t stop writing the same thing on my own blog: https://davepeck.org/2015/05/05/twitter-mainland/ https://davepeck.org/2015/05/05/twitter-mainland/)
stevekemp 8y ago
> "HEY! We've got gambling and naked women!" And for that reason there is a mastadon instance for sex-workers: https://switter.at/about https://switter.at/about
- boyce 8y ago
  Probably blackjack somewhere too
Zaivei4y 8y ago
> I mean, it might work? But I think Las Vegas hit on a much better method of populating empty area by just saying, "HEY! We've got gambling and naked women!" That's a bit the selling point of pixiv's mastodon instance. Artists post their art there, including NSFW material and it is more aligned with local moral standards. Now if you just want discover art it's a terrible tool (just like twitter is) compared to dedicate art hubs like pixiv or dA, but for following individual artists it seems to work.
mcnicholm 8y ago
Boost!
yogthos 8y ago
You've inadvertently highlighted part of the appeal of Mastodon here. People using Mastodon are the ones who see problems with platforms like Twitter. People who use Mastodon are often attracted to it because they care about issues like centralization, that most people don't care about. This becomes a filter for the community of individuals who share some common ethos that's not present in mainstream communities. Personally, my reasons for using Mastodon are purely ideological. Companies like Twitter and Facebook go against the very principles of having an open and distributed internet. They centralize power, and get to decide how people interact online. They also create walled gardens that make it difficult for users to move their data between. Each of these platforms locks the users in. With ActivityPub federation, you can have many different platforms interacting with each other seamlessly. For example, Mastodon already federates with PeerTube, so you can post a video on PeerTube and have it show up in your Mastodon timeline. This is something that will never be possible between Twitter and YouTube since they're run by different companies that have no interest in letting their users communicate with each other. I think whether Mastodon can succeed or not is past academic debate at this point. The community has over a million users now, and it's growing actively. Mastodon is very resilient by it's very nature of being open and distributed. A company like Twitter needs to make money to stay afloat, if it doesn't grow then it will go under. This is not the case for Mastodon since it's largely an open source effort, and the core team needs relatively meager amount of money to stay afloat. Meanwhile, the distributed nature means that the cost of running Mastodon is distributed across the community. Instead of one company having to run servers that can support millions of users, you have lots of small instances that each support thousands of users and federate together.
danShumway 8y ago
> Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter, instagram, or Snapchat. Moderation and content quality. You know the reason why people prefer reading the New York Times instead of checkout-counter tabloids? The reason why people like buying from Amazon instead of Ebay? I mean, Ebay usually has better prices. Why would anyone buy from a store just because it's able to (or at least claims to be able to) filter bad products and keep off scammers? That's Mastadon's advantage. The userbase isn't crap. Twitter, so far, has shown no indication that its userbase is ever going to be anything except crap. I don't think it's possible for Twitter to even start fixing that problem. Moderation doesn't scale. If you're on social media not just to connect to friends - if you're on social media because you want to actually consume cultural content or interact with new communities, then this is like comparing Youtube and Netflix. 90% of everything on Twitter is garbage, and it's suddenly your responsibility as user to sort through all of it? People want a platform that just works. They don't want to have to download custom block lists off of Github, or turn off DMs whenever anybody gets mad at them. They don't want to have to curate their own timeline. They want somebody else to do it for them, and Twitter can't do that. > Alternatively, is there some new and novel porn that Mastodon will allow me to access? Probably? Twitter has policies about pornography - they're inconsistently applied, but they're there. You could make a dedicated Mastadon instance that allows whatever. You can also choose not to have porn show up when you search across an instance because, again, Twitter can't moderate and Mastadon can. I would feel a lot more comfortable allowing a kid to sign up for a Mastadon instance than Twitter.
- h4b4n3r0 8y ago
  >> You know the reason why people prefer reading >> the New York Times instead of checkout-counter >> tabloids? I'm not actually sure that's true. Upon a cursory check, People Magazine has a slightly greater circulation than NYT. Heck, a non-trivial number people on YouTube have greater circulation than NYT or mainstream TV News channels and shows, while filming their stuff in the living room of their apartment.
  - danShumway 8y ago
    McDonalds serves more customers than a five star restaurant, but that doesn't mean the restaurant is a bad investment or won't be able to turn a profit. You're talking about different target audiences. The question isn't whether or not Mastadon completely kills Twitter and literally everyone moves over - it's whether there's a compelling reason for a significant number of people to switch over. Is it viable to for Mastadon to become a Twitter alternative with a broad level of adoption? What people bring up over and over on every one of these articles is, "Oh, the project is doomed because why would any normal person switch over? You're only ever going to have the idealistic tech people on it, and it'll die as soon as they lose interest." But it turns out that quality has a wide mainstream appeal, and it is a valid strategy to compete with other businesses purely on the basis of "our content is better." If Mastadon grows to the point where it has a similarly sized (albeit slightly smaller) userbase than Twitter and then stalls out, I don't any of what I said above would be invalidated. ;) Quite the opposite.
ForHackernews 8y ago
Honestly, to a first order, no regular people care about Twitter either. Only journalists, celebrities and a small cadre of tech folks who haven't quit yet still use Twitter. Twitter has only a tiny fraction of the users of Facebook or YouTube.
egypturnash 8y ago
It's a place you can go to talk with your friends and maybe make a few new ones, without constantly having things that show up that try to piss you off. And as it grows maybe it starts to be a place where you have to go to find some of your friends. I mean, who the hell wants to be on Facebook any more? How many people still go there because that's where they can keep up with certain circles? It's also a place you can run for your friends, and kick out anyone who comes in trying to start trouble. We've got chill. We've got quiet. We've got a place to talk semi-publically without EVERY ASSHOLE INCLUDING A ZILLION BOTS being there, and we've got an overall structure that maybe makes it more likely for people to want to keep things civil.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ChildOfChaos 8y ago
Yea, nobody cares about mastodon and they really need to change the name, all anyone is going to think of is the band when they hear this.
KirinDave 8y ago
What if I told you that twitter can have celebrity engagement tooling mastodon can be for people actually talking to other humans, and that these are other use cases artificially slammed together by Facebook and Twitter to try and monetize services that no user asked to monetize. Sit on your high horse until the heat death of the sun, for all I care. But don't think anyone's not noticing you're posting and talking here instead of on a reddit. There is clearly some benefits to sub-selection and partially isolated communities.
lokedhs 8y ago
Arguably, Twitter doesn't have much "regular users" either. Most people have never logged in to Twitter, and have no idea how it works. Ask around among the normal people you know if they've ever posted there. A somewhat larger number will say they've used it to read messages from famous people but for most normal people, their Twitter consumption consists of media reports of what someone said on the platform. As someone who uses Mastodon on a regular basis, I can tell you that it's usable right now, and that I have much better interactions there than anywhere else. At the moment, Mastodon isn't Paris or London, and thankfully it isn't Las Vegas either. And that might actually be why it's such a nice place.
chris_wot 8y ago
No "regular" person liked Twitter, at least not until it got critical mass. The entire point of Mastodon is to ensure there is no single instance that can control every other instance. Twitter has real issues. For instance, due to their inability to police truly awful behaviour (in the name of freedom of expression) there is no way of limiting the very worst excesses of the medium. However, if you localize instances, then you allow people to gravitate to those instances they feel most free to join. It also allows instances to reject other instances they really don't want anything to do with - so Fosstodon would presumably block anything from Stormfront. Frankly though, your idea of "fringe groups" is wrong - it will probably allow for SIGs. In fact, I'd say that Mastodon in that regard seems to be more like a distributed reddit than Twitter, only it basically emulates Twitter features and UI.
throwaway2048 8y ago
Nobody among regular people cared about twitter at first either, and it was far from the first social media site.
icc97 8y ago
I see this as similar to a Windows vs Linux thing. Where as Mastodon might never be popular there's nothing to stop it existing. People can find their own communities however small and be content in those. Regular people never used Linux and they still don't use Linux desktops. But there's still lots and lots of Linux desktop distros that people who use love. Not many people have genuine affection for using Windows, but when someone's installed their own distro they have genuine affection for using it. They'll donate hours and hours of their free time fixing issues. People currently have genuine affection for using a mastodon instance. Genuine affection is a very powerful tool.
exadeci 8y ago
Mastodon is quite big in Japan for some reason, also sex workers have started using Mastodon as a platform where they can express themselves freely. Eventually, it could attract the masses.

TillE 8y ago

You say problem, I say advantage. Not everything has to be a massive public square! It's okay to be niche. Until the mid/late 2000s, the internet was far more decentralized and often much the better for it. In other words: https://mastodon.social/@helldude/100572161034726032 https://mastodon.social/@helldude/100572161034726032

philippz 8y ago
"You say problem, I say advantage." - What are you aiming for then? What is the whole point of that "elevator pitch" if not getting more attention for and grow it so it's not that niche anymore?
- maxsilver 8y ago
  > What is the whole point of that "elevator pitch" if not getting more attention for and grow it so it's not that niche anymore? I think the idea is that they want to use their unique design to grow lots more niches, not make any one niche bigger. If Twitter is like Times Square, Mastodon is like Kansas City's town square. Mastodon's plan seems not to grow Kansas City into a Times Square sized competitor -- their plan seems to be to grow 1,000 more new-but-different Kansas City sized town squares. At least, that's the impression I'm getting from reading the third and fourth header's paragraphs.
Rjevski 8y ago
The internet and a social network are two different things. The internet doesn’t necessarily need everyone to be on it to be successful. The whole point of a social network is that the majority of people are on it. That’s why Facebook is still successful despite being an absolute dump. I don’t care about the technicalities, open source, etc (and I say that as a software engineer). I care about being able to lookup the person I just met at the bar and add/follow them. Until Mastodon can achieve that, I won’t care about it.
- pmyteh 8y ago
  The large majority of people aren't on Twitter, FWIW. Every social media platform except possibly Facebook is globally niche, and most are locally niche too.
  - adventured 8y ago
    Twitter isn't niche when it comes to what matters the most for their platform: having all the most important attention getting users on there. It's dominant. Even Instagram doesn't have what Twitter does on that front. Twitter has an immense collection of people that particularly matter in their given field, interesting famous people, and so on: celebrities, journalists, media personalities, musicians, authors, politicians, athletes, techies, companies, bankers, VCs, CEOs, entrepreneurs, famous bloggers and gamers, fashion people, etc. Twitter has an extremely dense, active collection of those people. You can say that you don't personally care about that, however the majority of people very clearly do (and always will).

teaneedz 8y ago

I think you nailed the USP of Mastodon. Keeping out the marketers, advertisers, vanity metric chasing or fandom makes Mastodon that peaceful scenic beach where your fellow beach goers say hello and share some of their food with you. I'll take Mastodon fringe over obnoxious Twitter or Facebook anytime.

thevardanian 8y ago
People often forget that at the beginning none of the current giants were "mainstream", in fact what made them attractive was the fact that they had a unique audience that formed a strong community amongst each other. The idea of "mainstream" is dying, and will continue to do so. What we're seeing is a deep cultural fracture where communities, ideas, and people do not form the kind of stardom or centralized propagation of ideas that the previous decades were known by. As production gets cheaper, and getting an audience becomes easier, people will begin to form seamless self-sustained communities that support each other (think patreon). If video killed the radio star, then the internet killed the star, and fractured it into infinite pieces.
- extradego 8y ago
  You read it here. It's hard to see how this is the future without experiencing it in some way personally. Facebook Groups connected me with fans of a particular kind of fringe art about 4 years ago and made leaving Facebook really difficult. This might seem exceedingly anecdotal, and I get that, but you have to realize that, before Facebook, it would have been impossible for any of us to even know this interest existed; much less that there were others also into it. Nothing in the cultural canon quite sufficed, although some trends in music and literature had come close, none of them quite articulated the thing. Finding the thing was a necessary part of a certain stage of my life, and gave me a psychological grounding that something mainstream might never could have. I think admitting so actually devalues the spectacle in question, but I can't deny it. There was a value in the fact that this small group of people spoke this unique language. We became something like a tribe. Attention economics are strange and only beginning to define our lives. Younger people will depend on fringe engagements to achieve a sense of self-identity that used to be a given. Life experience is going to take a new shape accordingly. I think early evidence of this is in music scenes, which is haphazardly often the case with forms of sociocultural influence. No conventional wisdom can explain the proliferation of indie music and things like tape labels but these things are massive forces. They just genuinely don't care what you think. They have an audience and it's up to you to be a part. Mastadon is strangely ahead of the curve and probably doing a poor job of meeting in the middle. I think it would benefit from shoving everyone into Mastadon.social at signup and letting them learn about instances from there. Finding a home is too difficult as it is. But, eventually, it does look like the future.

ohtwenty 8y ago

>Look, you want me to get excited about Mastodon? Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with[…] Have a healthy conversation? I know some people who stopped or reduced social media usage because that was pretty much impossible. Plus the local feed thing. Start an instance for your neighbourhood, follow people who are on there, and you've got all the neighbourhoodly gossip on there. Whilst still being able to follow whoever else you want (except Wil Wheaton because he went to a non-federated instance)

urtrs 8y ago
Last time I tried mastodon it was really difficult to find any quality content. Search was mostly unusable and local timeline was full of jokes and things that did not matter to me at all.
- ohtwenty 8y ago
  Fair enough. The current influx has made this worse (lots of metaposting about joining mastodon), but that depends on who/what you're looking for. Try another instance, maybe? That might be the greatest onboarding weakness, that if you settle on an instance that you don't like it kind of ruins the experience

randomsearch 8y ago

To summarise what you've said in one sentence: "mastodon is a technology, not a product" - it doesn't have a business model, a way to scale and grow like a business. And if it did, well it'd be just another commercial social network, and most of them completely suck. Technology is not the solution to this problem.

randomsearch 8y ago
Further: I just looked at Mastodon.social. No, my non-nerd friends do not wish to "Join the Federation!" Not to knock what Mastodon are doing, rather to criticise the idea that it's a social network for everyone.
codesections 8y ago
> "mastodon is a technology, not a product" - it doesn't have a business model, a way to scale and grow like a business. I'd agree with 2/3rds of that. Mastodon is a technology, not a product, and it doesn't have a business model. But that does not mean that it can't scale and grow—it means that it doesn't have any way to turn scaling and growing into money. email is a technology; javascript is a technology, the microchip is a technology. All of those technologies have seen tremendous growth, and none of them have made money (though products using them certainly have). I suspect that, if Mastodon grows, it will be precisely because it is a technology, not a product. Making money isn't the only way to grow.

codesections 8y ago

> Look, you want me to get excited about Mastodon? Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter I don't think the advantage for Mastodon is being able to do anything that Twitter can't. Instead, it's being able to do everything that Twitter can without a lot of the negatives that come with Twitter. My view is that, fundamentally, Twitter is a good platform, but it suffers from a number of toxic elements (dog piles, turning everything into angry politics, new "features" designed to increase engagement/number of ads you see, etc.). I'm guessing that "Twitter, but without everything you hate about Twitter" is enough to overcome the network effects, especially as Twitter keeps finding new ways to annoy its users for money. But maybe I'm wrong about that. I guess we'll see.

Exuma 8y ago
What he's saying is that's not a good enough reason to switch. Regular users simply do not care about any of that, and that's where 90% of your base comes from.
- majewsky 8y ago
  I disagree with the argument though. By the same line of reasoning, you could have said in 1997 that Amazon is not a compelling idea because you can already buy books elsewhere. But Amazon allowed you to buy books without the hassle of going to the store. So, without making any predictions about Mastodon, I think that "like X, without the things that make X annoying" is a reasonable pitch if executed correctly.
  - Exuma 8y ago
    Comparing buying books online vs at a physical location isn't even in the same universe as retweeting something but without a message attatched
  - elm-tree- 8y ago
    Amazon made it easier to get books; you no longer need to leave your house. What does Mastadon make easier?

znpy 8y ago

Meh. I see your points, they are all valid and true. Mastodon might "win" just because it'll keep working after Twitter finally dies.

WilliamEdward 8y ago
You put a lot of trust into twitter dying, but don't seem to concede that inertia is a gigantic part of what holds twitter above water. Users are already too well established on twitter to leave even in the worst of times (see: facebook incidents), meaning I'm quite doubtful it will die in our entire lifetime let alone soon. Social networks haven't been around long enough to be able to tell whether dying is actually even possible for them.

tomohawk 8y ago

The big social media sites are in the process of evicting everyone who doesn't 100% agree with them. We've seen this kind of thing in history before, and the one thing we know about it is that it is a process without end. Once one group gets removed, another group becomes the outlier, and they become the next target, and so on. Heck, they're already banning political ads from mainstream candidates for US Congress. This creates a demand for alternatives. Once a community moves to a system like Mastodon, that creates a demand for that system. No one cares about myspace anymore. In 10 years, noone will care about twitter. That's the nature of technology.

that_jojo 8y ago
And right at this moment, no one gives a shit about Mastodon.
- DaiPlusPlus 8y ago
  Myself and many of my followers and the people that I follow are suddenly starting to adopt Mastodon, especially with clients that cross-post to both Twitter and Mastodon - because we just don’t like the official Twitter client and are unhappy with Twitter’s recent killing-off of third-party clients.
  - branchless 8y ago
    Can I use a mastedon client to view Twitter? I guess not as the API is the blocker.
- papaf 8y ago
  I remember when the www was the same and the CompuServe users said the same thing. Mastodon has a similar feel in that the content is amateurish and free. As an anecdote, I use chaos.social and they are throttling signups because there are too many new signups. Maybe you will be surprised.
  - s73v3r_ 8y ago

gfodor 8y ago

You realize similar dissmissiveness was levied against Twitter before it took off. It's hard to predict the fate of social networks.

teleclimber 8y ago

> Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter, instagram, or Snapchat. You can communicate with anything that supports ActivityPub. That means that you can get RSS-like feeds of blogs in your Mastodon timeline, or use Masto or any other AP-supporting platform to comment on a blog post (if it supports AP for that). I find that exciting: your self-hosted personal site can now be just as much a part of the social network as something that was posted natively. It's very much a work in progress but the promise of Mastodon is not so much replacing Twitter as it is a gateway to an internet-wide social graph with no walls.

twblalock 8y ago
Regular people do not self-host websites or know what RSS is. What does Mastodon offer that regular people care about?
- Barrin92 8y ago
  significantly less toxicity and content they don't want to see in the first place. Twitter is like standing in the centre of a crowded mall on a hot summer day. Mastodon is a small friendly pub. I guess what it offers them is social media that actually maintains your peace of mind to a degree.
  - teaneedz 8y ago
    Spot on. I left Twitter (well left an auto bot behind) and took my live posts to Mastodon. It's so much more relaxing with masto.
  - ivan_gammel 8y ago
    Open anarchic communities are not toxic only while they are young and fresh. Eventually they will grow and either establish a set of formal and legally binding ceremonies with unsatisfactory result (actually I don't know any really good decentralized example here - Wikipedia is the closest one) or become toxic and die (IRC).

radus 8y ago

Personally I'm looking at using this with my small network of friends and family and could care less whether or not Kim K joins. What you can do here (and with other similar applications) is share things with your friends without ads and without your data being owned and sold by a corporation.

davidcbc 8y ago
Only if all my friends and family are on it, and they'll want all their friends and family on it, and they'll want their friends and family... etc... It's like the value of a social media platform is in lots of people being on it

qznc 8y ago

Has anybody tried business models on top of Mastodon/ActivityPub? For example, a premium instance. Costs 100$ per month. Gives you 24/7 phone support, a free iPhone X, and the opportunity to toot exclusively to other premium users.

codesections 8y ago
This might not be quite what you described, but masto.host is a hosting provider that specializes in providing managed hosting for Mastodon instances (and they charge way less than $100/month!)

Karrot_Kream 8y ago

By that logic, what did Facebook offer that MySpace didn't? What did MySpace offer that a forum didn't? What did all of these provide that a lot newspaper didn't? A lot of these platforms brought things to the table that weren't direct product features. People are motivated by more than features, though a lot of tech people seem to feel otherwise.

yahnusername 8y ago

I miss the old internet when we trusted each other enough to trade star wars cards by posting on forums and exchanging mailing addresses. If I tried to do that on today's internet I'd have a SWAT team show up to murder me. And not even because my star wars trades are bad, but because of my support of women's rights. When you have One Thing For Everything, all the wires get crossed. It sucks. The place where the people AREN'T and the kylie jenners AREN'T is a perk of mastodon to some, not a flaw. It's like the tech nerd version of kids not using facebook because it's their parents' social network. I just want to share cool pictures of my modular origami and not constantly be two degrees of separation from Trump's latest outrage

deleted 8y ago
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davepeck 8y ago

> Look, you want me to get excited about Mastodon? Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter, instagram, or Snapchat. This, again and again. (And again; it seems I can’t stop writing the same thing on my own blog: https://davepeck.org/2015/05/05/twitter-mainland/ https://davepeck.org/2015/05/05/twitter-mainland/)

stevekemp 8y ago

> "HEY! We've got gambling and naked women!" And for that reason there is a mastadon instance for sex-workers: https://switter.at/about https://switter.at/about

boyce 8y ago
Probably blackjack somewhere too

Zaivei4y 8y ago

> I mean, it might work? But I think Las Vegas hit on a much better method of populating empty area by just saying, "HEY! We've got gambling and naked women!" That's a bit the selling point of pixiv's mastodon instance. Artists post their art there, including NSFW material and it is more aligned with local moral standards. Now if you just want discover art it's a terrible tool (just like twitter is) compared to dedicate art hubs like pixiv or dA, but for following individual artists it seems to work.

mcnicholm 8y ago

Boost!

yogthos 8y ago

You've inadvertently highlighted part of the appeal of Mastodon here. People using Mastodon are the ones who see problems with platforms like Twitter. People who use Mastodon are often attracted to it because they care about issues like centralization, that most people don't care about. This becomes a filter for the community of individuals who share some common ethos that's not present in mainstream communities. Personally, my reasons for using Mastodon are purely ideological. Companies like Twitter and Facebook go against the very principles of having an open and distributed internet. They centralize power, and get to decide how people interact online. They also create walled gardens that make it difficult for users to move their data between. Each of these platforms locks the users in. With ActivityPub federation, you can have many different platforms interacting with each other seamlessly. For example, Mastodon already federates with PeerTube, so you can post a video on PeerTube and have it show up in your Mastodon timeline. This is something that will never be possible between Twitter and YouTube since they're run by different companies that have no interest in letting their users communicate with each other. I think whether Mastodon can succeed or not is past academic debate at this point. The community has over a million users now, and it's growing actively. Mastodon is very resilient by it's very nature of being open and distributed. A company like Twitter needs to make money to stay afloat, if it doesn't grow then it will go under. This is not the case for Mastodon since it's largely an open source effort, and the core team needs relatively meager amount of money to stay afloat. Meanwhile, the distributed nature means that the cost of running Mastodon is distributed across the community. Instead of one company having to run servers that can support millions of users, you have lots of small instances that each support thousands of users and federate together.

danShumway 8y ago

> Show me something exciting I can do with it that I can't do with twitter, instagram, or Snapchat. Moderation and content quality. You know the reason why people prefer reading the New York Times instead of checkout-counter tabloids? The reason why people like buying from Amazon instead of Ebay? I mean, Ebay usually has better prices. Why would anyone buy from a store just because it's able to (or at least claims to be able to) filter bad products and keep off scammers? That's Mastadon's advantage. The userbase isn't crap. Twitter, so far, has shown no indication that its userbase is ever going to be anything except crap. I don't think it's possible for Twitter to even start fixing that problem. Moderation doesn't scale. If you're on social media not just to connect to friends - if you're on social media because you want to actually consume cultural content or interact with new communities, then this is like comparing Youtube and Netflix. 90% of everything on Twitter is garbage, and it's suddenly your responsibility as user to sort through all of it? People want a platform that just works. They don't want to have to download custom block lists off of Github, or turn off DMs whenever anybody gets mad at them. They don't want to have to curate their own timeline. They want somebody else to do it for them, and Twitter can't do that. > Alternatively, is there some new and novel porn that Mastodon will allow me to access? Probably? Twitter has policies about pornography - they're inconsistently applied, but they're there. You could make a dedicated Mastadon instance that allows whatever. You can also choose not to have porn show up when you search across an instance because, again, Twitter can't moderate and Mastadon can. I would feel a lot more comfortable allowing a kid to sign up for a Mastadon instance than Twitter.

h4b4n3r0 8y ago
>> You know the reason why people prefer reading >> the New York Times instead of checkout-counter >> tabloids? I'm not actually sure that's true. Upon a cursory check, People Magazine has a slightly greater circulation than NYT. Heck, a non-trivial number people on YouTube have greater circulation than NYT or mainstream TV News channels and shows, while filming their stuff in the living room of their apartment.
- danShumway 8y ago
  McDonalds serves more customers than a five star restaurant, but that doesn't mean the restaurant is a bad investment or won't be able to turn a profit. You're talking about different target audiences. The question isn't whether or not Mastadon completely kills Twitter and literally everyone moves over - it's whether there's a compelling reason for a significant number of people to switch over. Is it viable to for Mastadon to become a Twitter alternative with a broad level of adoption? What people bring up over and over on every one of these articles is, "Oh, the project is doomed because why would any normal person switch over? You're only ever going to have the idealistic tech people on it, and it'll die as soon as they lose interest." But it turns out that quality has a wide mainstream appeal, and it is a valid strategy to compete with other businesses purely on the basis of "our content is better." If Mastadon grows to the point where it has a similarly sized (albeit slightly smaller) userbase than Twitter and then stalls out, I don't any of what I said above would be invalidated. ;) Quite the opposite.

ForHackernews 8y ago

Honestly, to a first order, no regular people care about Twitter either. Only journalists, celebrities and a small cadre of tech folks who haven't quit yet still use Twitter. Twitter has only a tiny fraction of the users of Facebook or YouTube.

egypturnash 8y ago

It's a place you can go to talk with your friends and maybe make a few new ones, without constantly having things that show up that try to piss you off. And as it grows maybe it starts to be a place where you have to go to find some of your friends. I mean, who the hell wants to be on Facebook any more? How many people still go there because that's where they can keep up with certain circles? It's also a place you can run for your friends, and kick out anyone who comes in trying to start trouble. We've got chill. We've got quiet. We've got a place to talk semi-publically without EVERY ASSHOLE INCLUDING A ZILLION BOTS being there, and we've got an overall structure that maybe makes it more likely for people to want to keep things civil.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ChildOfChaos 8y ago

Yea, nobody cares about mastodon and they really need to change the name, all anyone is going to think of is the band when they hear this.

KirinDave 8y ago

What if I told you that twitter can have celebrity engagement tooling mastodon can be for people actually talking to other humans, and that these are other use cases artificially slammed together by Facebook and Twitter to try and monetize services that no user asked to monetize. Sit on your high horse until the heat death of the sun, for all I care. But don't think anyone's not noticing you're posting and talking here instead of on a reddit. There is clearly some benefits to sub-selection and partially isolated communities.

lokedhs 8y ago

Arguably, Twitter doesn't have much "regular users" either. Most people have never logged in to Twitter, and have no idea how it works. Ask around among the normal people you know if they've ever posted there. A somewhat larger number will say they've used it to read messages from famous people but for most normal people, their Twitter consumption consists of media reports of what someone said on the platform. As someone who uses Mastodon on a regular basis, I can tell you that it's usable right now, and that I have much better interactions there than anywhere else. At the moment, Mastodon isn't Paris or London, and thankfully it isn't Las Vegas either. And that might actually be why it's such a nice place.

chris_wot 8y ago

No "regular" person liked Twitter, at least not until it got critical mass. The entire point of Mastodon is to ensure there is no single instance that can control every other instance. Twitter has real issues. For instance, due to their inability to police truly awful behaviour (in the name of freedom of expression) there is no way of limiting the very worst excesses of the medium. However, if you localize instances, then you allow people to gravitate to those instances they feel most free to join. It also allows instances to reject other instances they really don't want anything to do with - so Fosstodon would presumably block anything from Stormfront. Frankly though, your idea of "fringe groups" is wrong - it will probably allow for SIGs. In fact, I'd say that Mastodon in that regard seems to be more like a distributed reddit than Twitter, only it basically emulates Twitter features and UI.

throwaway2048 8y ago

Nobody among regular people cared about twitter at first either, and it was far from the first social media site.

icc97 8y ago

I see this as similar to a Windows vs Linux thing. Where as Mastodon might never be popular there's nothing to stop it existing. People can find their own communities however small and be content in those. Regular people never used Linux and they still don't use Linux desktops. But there's still lots and lots of Linux desktop distros that people who use love. Not many people have genuine affection for using Windows, but when someone's installed their own distro they have genuine affection for using it. They'll donate hours and hours of their free time fixing issues. People currently have genuine affection for using a mastodon instance. Genuine affection is a very powerful tool.

exadeci 8y ago

Mastodon is quite big in Japan for some reason, also sex workers have started using Mastodon as a platform where they can express themselves freely. Eventually, it could attract the masses.