13 ms·

Mastodon still can’t replace Twitter

93 points by rzk 4y ago

rvz 4y ago
And it is not early days anymore. We have given it enough time to realize the claims as a Twitter alternative and it has simply failed. Twitter had tens of millions of users in its first 6 years. Mastodon is still struggling and considers 20 people as 'trending'. Mastodon is a total failure, and virtually no-one is there or uses it frequently or daily other than the general hyper tech-crowd and that is the fact. Regardless of the $48BN takeover, I'm already seeing the Mastodon circus running back to Twitter as they knew Mastodon was going the way of the Mastodon; extinction.
- dumpsterlid 4y ago
  My favorite part about Mastodon/The Fediverse is people like you think it is dead and hopeless and don't come there
  - TylerE 4y ago
    Consider the feeling mutual.
    - dumpsterlid 4y ago
      Happily so!
  - rvz 4y ago
    It is dead. Even the users who 'moved' to Mastodon came back to Twitter again are still posting on Twitter. Why? Because there is no-one on Mastodon even after the Twitter 'exodus'. We are talking 6 years and even less users using it. That sounds like a total failure on Mastodon's side to be a viable Twitter alternative.
    - elsjaako 4y ago
      I use it, and sometimes I unfollow people because the timeline gets to be too much to keep track of (so not dead). I have met people off it in real life. I also have a twitter account, that I use to follow a few (6 maybe?) accounts I care about. I scroll through that every week or two. I like those accounts, but twitter feels needy, constantly screaming for more attention. This is the website, not using an ad blocker. You say Mastodon is dead, so maybe you like a website constantly pushing you to engage more? I can understand how it would make the site feel more lively, especially for new users. Mastodon is not the same as Twitter, but there are plenty of us that prefer it. If you want 100000 followers it's the wrong platform, I'll give you that. > Even the users who 'moved' to Mastodon came back to Twitter again are still posting on Twitter. Why? Because there is no-one on Mastodon even after the Twitter 'exodus'. There have been many small exoduses, and some people stayed with Mastodon.
      - rvz 4y ago
        It is indeed dead. We have given it 6 years and little to no-one is on the platform. > Mastodon is not the same as Twitter, but there are plenty of us that prefer it. With the constant comparisons and mentions of Mastodon, being an alternative to Twitter even in its early days, it will be judged as so and my strict judgement is that it has failed. > There have been many small exoduses, and some people stayed with Mastodon. I'm almost certain that this year's Twitter exodus to Mastodon, that more than 90% of users who registered at the time do not use it regularly and have moved back to Twitter due to little to no interaction there. That is the fact of the matter after 6 years of operation.
- slater 4y ago
  Twitter doesn't have to "lose", for Mastodon to "win".
  - naniwaduni 4y ago
    By virtue of the incumbency and respective "business" models, it is possible for Mastodon to not lose even as Twitter wins, while the converse is ... implausible.
- lioeters 4y ago
  Just because you are not there, doesn't mean other people are not. > My conservative estimate of current Mastodon network totals, based on my own stats aggregation, is 3 million registered users and 250k monthly active users. > - Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko (April 2022)
  - TylerE 4y ago
    That sounds pretty dismal? E.g. >90% of "registered users" don't actually use the platform.
    - culi 4y ago
      Do you think Twitter or Facebook is any better?
      - TylerE 4y ago
        Yes? Facebook's MAU is almost half the world population. Hell, their daily active users is almost 2B.
        ipaddr 4y ago
        Facebook claims 700+ million login daily but many are bots. It doesn't matter because you are not talking or interacting with them. You have a small list and unless you explore groups. Most of the world uses google search outside of China. I don't feel connected to them and if the volume dropped to a few hundred people using google search it wouldn't affect my experience. Facebook isn't a community site it is a social media with expectations that you consume more content than you contribute.
    - rvz 4y ago
      It's because it is dismal and Eugen is right as well and there is evidence supporting that [0] which it is still true to this day with the up-to-date instances that are active and with users who have logged in at least once over a week. 3,064,237 total registered Mastodon accounts and only 192,384 users using it. That is 7% of active users using the platform and 93% of everyone else not using it. There is virtually no one to talk to or interact with on the platform. This is enough to tell us that Mastodon is indeed a failure and has not replaced Twitter after 6 years of marketing itself as a Twitter alternative. [0] http://sp3r4z.fr/mastodon/accurate_user_count http://sp3r4z.fr/mastodon/accurate_user_count
- betwixthewires 4y ago
  It's not a failure. This idea that it has to be huge to be a success comes from the instagram, Facebook, twitter and YouTube way of counting success. 100 million views, 10k likes in an hour, 100k followers... these humongous numbers are not normal, and they're not necessary for a rewarding social experience online. In fact I think the opposite is true. Lots of people use the network daily. I do. It's more fun than twitter. You can experiment. You can say whatever you want if you pick the right servers. And you'll see people doing that, and saying things you don't like. And thats fine. I'll never use big corporate social media again in any form.
  - rvz 4y ago
    > It's not a failure It is a failure. Having 3 million registered users and only 192,000 using it every month in the end after 6 years is more than 90% of all users not using it. With those numbers, there is virtually no-one using the platform which explains why many continued to keep posting on Twitter, more than on Mastodon. So it is still a massive and complete failure in almost every way. [0] http://sp3r4z.fr/mastodon/accurate_user_count http://sp3r4z.fr/mastodon/accurate_user_count
    - pgcj_poster 4y ago
      192,000 is not "virtually no one." There are a about dozen sovereign nations with fewer people.
      - rvz 4y ago
        > 192,000 is not "virtually no one." Yes it is, when compared to the total number of registered Mastodon users as I have mentioned from the start with "virtually" meaning 'nearly', 'almost', 'more or less', 'close to'. My use of the word could not get any more accurate and clearer. 192,000 of 3,000,000 is around 6.4%, where that is closer to 0 than 94% is, meaning that approximately 2,808,000 users are still not using it regularly after registration and after 6 years of existence, it has struggled with that ever since. You can try to deny it. But the numbers don't lie.
- gargron 4y ago
  Mastodon considers 20 people in a hashtag as trending because people don't use hashtags for new topics very often, and the hashtags that do get used often and regularly are exactly the opposite of "trending". And because trending data is somewhat limited by your server's view of the fediverse (each server calculates trends based on content from users it is subscribed to). Just 6 days ago somebody posted a poll asking people how often they log in to Mastodon [1]. 2,691 people responded to their poll, 71% answering "every day". Consider it was posted by someone with 201 followers, and people only had 6 days to respond. That, to me, is slightly more than virtually no-one. 2,859 sysadmins consider Mastodon worth running on their domain. I use Mastodon on a daily basis. I follow interesting people on it, I get more than my fair share of cat pictures through it, I find out about things happening in the world through it. I don't use Twitter. To me, it is a Twitter alternative, because it has replaced Twitter for me. Don't see what other claims there are to realize. [1]: https://todon.nl/@alternative_be/108894477425005957 https://todon.nl/@alternative_be/108894477425005957
margarina72 4y ago
But was it ever supposed to? If I remember correctly, one of the main element of the product vision was to allow better moderation, to have a "safer" online experience. Provided it is a very relative concept, the community approach makes a lot of sense. In a way, it is very similar to how forums used to be. Can it be improved? 100%. Many UX elements would make the product more popular, but was it meant to be a twitter replacement? not sure.
- krater23 4y ago
  It was in the first way really to cancel some other people talking about things that maiking you up? I think then, it should die immediatly. Sorry for my bad english.
rootw0rm 4y ago
whatever, still way more metal than Twitter
- krater23 4y ago
  you thinkn mental?
api 4y ago
Nothing can equal Twitter as the place for the rich and powerful to make complete fools of themselves. It’s got that niche locked down. Also seems to have the online lynch mob niche pretty solid. Mastodon is good for communities and tech chat.
- sph 4y ago
  Given the amount of times I see Mastodon threads posted on this forum (very rarely), I'm not sure it's good for tech chat. We talk about Mastodon the tech a lot, but I don't see it linked very much outside of meta discussion about the platform.
betwixthewires 4y ago
So I get the whole point of the article, I get the criticisms, and I get that nobody but the most technical minded, kool aid drinking fans of the technology care about what I'm going to say. Most of the problems listed are UI problems. You can use any client you want. A few shortcomings of all current clients, particularly application clients (not web clients) are the inability to merge timelines, the inability to create custom timelines, the inability to follow instances and the inability to remote follow (client only follow, your account isn't actually following). These are all things technically possible that expand the usability of the software but nobody seems to implement it. Beyond that, there's more than just mastodon there. And the network can replace twitter. And it will, either it or something like it. Twitter is a company, it has to show revenue to investors, which means it has a limited lifespan hardcoded in. It has to change things, which always means alienating users. An open network like activitypub on the other hand, can function just fine with 2 users for a hundred years before people start using it. It doesn't have to have growth, which means it can continue on indefinitely. Nobody has to change anything, but you can if you want. Open tools will, in all cases, supplant the corporate offerings they compete with given enough time.
INTPenis 4y ago
Whatever, ActivityPub is still a really cool thing. Just looking at the public timeline of a well connected AP node gives me hope for a user owned social media federation.
colesantiago 4y ago
It's sad that TruthSocial and some right wing instances in the past (like Gab once was) was one of the biggest Mastodon instances, this cements the main Mastodon instance as a very niche social network which the mainstream will never use. I don't think Mastodon can ever recover from this even with the so called 'migration' that happened because of Elon buying Twitter, I don't think that caught on to shift anything, probably only a small fraction of techies use the main Mastodon instance and that is pretty much it. TruthSocial makes this even worse.
- chaxor 4y ago
  It's a bit odd that mastodon is seen as a far right platform when Twitter is such an enormous company with corporate interests which will ultimately continually add features to alienate users, while the free and open source nature of mastodon is based in a much more liberal and progressive type of origin/framework.
  - colesantiago 4y ago
    Doesn't change the fact that TruthSocial the right wing social network is one of the biggest Mastodon instances, federated or not. When I think of Mastodon I think of TruthSocial, the main instances have little to no activity, almost no reason to join any them.
kixiQu 4y ago
> a combination of Twitter’s chronological feed with the community-driven spaces of Reddit Eugen's product vision is fighting the "community-driven spaces" idea as hard as he can, as far as I understand – to the extent that that maps onto instances, and not the [groups that don't yet exist]. > But because each server effectively acts as a separate version of Mastodon, participating in multiple instances is a hassle. For each one, you must maintain separate profiles and follower lists, and there’s no way to view multiple “Local” timelines in a single feed. I agree that it'd be nice to be able to view other instances' local timelines. But from here on out, the piece gets real confused by its idea that this is the only way to use Mastodon and thus that you should have one account per instance – this is not how most people use Mastodon. > The mobile app isn’t really set up for hopping between instances, either. If you get bored with once instance and decide you’d like to check out another, the only option is to sign out of your account and sign up for a new instance from scratch. So... log on to your desktop and [move]. > The overarching issue here is that Mastodon is trying to be too much like Twitter when it really ought to be more like Reddit. If you want ActivityPub Reddit, you want [Lemmy], but with less FOSSy users. > In the ideal version of Mastodon, users would be able to browse the content of those communities, and jump between them at any time, but would still have easy ways to interact with anyone else on the network. This... is what I do. This is how I use Mastodon. This exists??? [groups that don't yet exist]: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/861#issuecomment-1135022537 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/861#issuecomment... [move]: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#move https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#move [Lemmy]: https://lemmy.ml/ https://lemmy.ml/
- Alekhine 4y ago
  > This... is what I do How do you do that? When I used Mastodon, I could only see my own instance's local timeline and the federated timeline. Basically, how do I Mastodon?
  - arcatech 4y ago
    Follow people (including people from other instances) and then interact with them on your timeline just like you would with Twitter.
sylware 4y ago
waiting for a clean twitter alternative with nitter (=interop with noscript/basic (x)html browsers which twitter is unable to do).
egypturnash 4y ago
It's largely replaced Twitter for talking to a lot of my friends. Which is the only reason I ever joined Twitter in the first place - all their Livejournals got replaced by these autoposts of cryptic fragments of conversations, and I reluctantly followed them to this annoying world of ultra-short posts that just kept getting shittier and shitter as Twitter kept on trying to make it profitable. And I can preemptively block entire instances full of chuds for myself and everyone else on the instance I run. It's great. It's nice. It's kinda like the Internet used to be before Endless September started. I do think it could be a lot better if Eugen would stop trying to make it so much Like Twitter, I upped the post length limit to ~7k and it's fucking wonderful. I can have conversations with my friends. In paragraphs.
- sph 4y ago
  Please indulge me: what's wrong with email for talking to your friends? Unless you think your conversations have to be public for everybody else to see.
  - egypturnash 4y ago
    Have you looked at your email inbox lately? Email is full of spam, and business, and businesses I dealt with in the past trying to entice me into giving them more money, and spam filters that can register false positives on stuff I do want to see. A non-profit social media site just has my friends, without any need to regularly spend time keeping up filters.
  - arcatech 4y ago
    Public conversations is part of the point of social media.
oxff 4y ago
On a technical level it is easy to make a product that is better than Twitter: replicate it exactly but fix the complaints. The reason it is not getting actually replaced by another product is very simple: they can't move the community of Twitter there. Largest public place to go and make your political enemies seethe and cope in 280 characters or less.
okonomiyaki3000 4y ago
You don't need to replace Twitter. It doesn't need to exist in the first place. Just stop using it. Replace using Twitter with not using Twitter.
- krater23 4y ago
- ArboriaInstitut 4y ago
  Over years on the platform I've built up a number of lists of people who I think have very interesting things to say on a number of topics. Where, outside of Twitter or a close replacement, could I find something like a thread delving into why Hollywood "antiwar" movies are actually usually a whitewash? https://twitter.com/mmabeuf/status/1324573014407729153 https://twitter.com/mmabeuf/status/1324573014407729153 Maybe this isn't the way most people are using Twitter though, I would agree that being off the platform entirely would be better than just letting their algos serve up content to you and becoming addicted to the dopamine rush of likes and retweets.
  - nmeofthestate 4y ago
    >Maybe this isn't the way most people are using Twitter though No, I think almost everyone on Twitter is there to consume stuff that conforms with their worldview/politics, same as you.
somat 4y ago
Perhaps not for you, but for me, who has never been on twitter it does ok. That aside, The whole twitter style, shouting into the void, microblog communication platform is really stupid. When I decided to give mastodon a try because someone I know set up an instance devoted to a subject I enjoy. the whole experience was baffling and inefficient compared to other communications systems I have tried. I stick with it because local instance is only about 100 people and they are all good folk. I Have a hard time imagining how terrible it is to have the whole world on one instance and am rather happy that I passed on twitter.
- Underphil 4y ago
  I feel the same as you, but the article isn't aimed at us. It's aimed at people who do use it, and possibly rely on it for connections etc.
scrame 4y ago
good. Twitter is garbage.
system16 4y ago
Mastodon's biggest Twitter differentiator and feature - multiple instances - is also its biggest flaw when it comes to ease of use. Users don't "get" the multiple instance concept. The article is spot on in that it is disorganized and there is no easy way to unify your account across instances.
gargron 4y ago
The author seems under to be under the wrong impression that Mastodon servers are isolated communities (and therefore compares them to subreddits). This is incorrect. Mastodon is a platform where a server of your choosing hosts your account, like an e-mail provider hosting your inbox. From that account, you follow any other account on the network, regardless of which server hosts that account. Everyone you follow appears in your home feed, and everyone who follows you receives your posts in their home feed. It is unfortunately a common misunderstanding, and I must admit we didn't help the situation by leaning into calling servers "communities" on joinmastodon.org in the past (not anymore). There do exist plenty of "themed" Mastodon servers, aimed at specific communities, e.g. phpc.social which describes itself as a server for the PHP community, because some secondary discovery features of Mastodon lend themselves to what kind of feels like a slack/irc/subreddit, but ultimately, in their primary purpose, servers are service providers just like GMail/Outlook/Fastmail are for e-mail.
- na85 4y ago
  >The author seems under to be under the wrong impression that Mastodon servers are isolated communities (and therefore compares them to subreddits). This is incorrect. Mastodon is a platform where a server of your choosing hosts your account, like an e-mail provider hosting your inbox. From that account, you follow any other account on the network, regardless of which server hosts that account. Everyone you follow appears in your home feed, and everyone who follows you receives your posts in their home feed. I've been aware of Mastodon pretty much since its inception and I had no idea that this was the case. The messaging really needs improved.
  - kevinmgranger 4y ago
    I remember early mastodon marketing being criticized for emphasizing federation _too much_, and that it would confuse new users.
  - shadowfacts 4y ago
    The sixth sentence on the project homepage: "Joining a server on Mastodon provides you with the power to communicate with any server across the globe." Not sure how much clearer it gets.
jrm4 4y ago
An interesting thing: Twitter is literally experimenting with being more "Mastodon-like" with "Circles" Are there any paths or efforts toward the reverse? I know that's not the design but might there be some value, utility, and possibility in a more "centralized" Mastodon? Specifically, the value of centralization here wouldn't be governance, but analytics. Finding out what people are "mostly talking about" and perhaps getting more attention to bigger names. I know that's not everybody's bag but I think it would be valuable.
imwillofficial 4y ago
After mastadon started blocking stuff they didn’t like at the client level, I bailed.
- elsjaako 4y ago
  I think you are referring to some of the mobile clients not interacting with gab. This wasn't mastodon itself. It's an open protocol, anyone can write a client. If you're referring to something else let me know, I'd be interested.
  - imwillofficial 4y ago
    Just because anyone can work around it, doesn’t mean they should have to. If the package maintainers themselves are censoring stuff as best they can, that’s beyond the pale. Gab had no more toxic content than any twitter thread on a contentious topic.
    - elsjaako 4y ago
      If MS Outlook started refusing to communicate with 163.com, would it be fair to say that email had banned 163.com? Would it be fair to say that email users had to work around this block? I think it's an issue with MS Outlook, not with email. AFAIK, the two apps that blocked gab were Tusky and Toot!. This isn't like all email clients were doing this. The other thing is that local server admins blocked gab en masse. This is why you should find an instance that matches your requirements.
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
I've had a mastodon account for years. Not only you can't get a tenth of the audience or quality publications you get on twitters, but also there is less diversity. A mastodon instance is often its own island, with one view of the world, and they don't connect to any other instances with a different view of the world because the others are intolerant assholes (but themselves are alright, of course). Ironic, given the protocol is made specifically to link instances together so that the network become more robust, and that people joined because it's a more open design than twitter. On the other hand, Twitter that is full of trends, SJW, extremists of all sides and censorship, manage to send me toward new paths of thinking regularly.
- sph 4y ago
  It's like the problem isn't the platform or the technology, but people aren't meant to voice their ideas for the whole world to see, anonymously. It's such a naive view that it's a good idea to attach a megaphone to anyone's mouth. The focus on decentralisation and not on solving the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory [1] means they focused on the wrong problem. They've just created an island for jerkwads that think they are better from the other jerkwads at the bird site. Now, I wouldn't be against a Twitter-like for direct friends. Like Google+ for a moment tried to do before it imploded. 1: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboards-and-other-anomalies https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...
ekianjo 4y ago
The author has probably not used Mastodon for more than 5 minutes to write such a ignorant piece about the network. The sign is that he talks about the immature Mastodon mobile app while unofficial clients have been around for years before, and are much more feature-full. If you don't know a topic, don't write about it.
- berkes 4y ago
  The author is an experienced 'new mastodon user'. And can therefore write about how it is for a new user to join. Much better than you or I (some 6years on the network, write software for the network) could ever do. Telling journalists what they may, or may not write, is always worrying. But telling they aren't allowed to write about problems they, from experience, see, even more so.
sohkamyung 4y ago
The good thing about having multiple Mastodon servers is you can sign up for multiple accounts (one on each server) and use each one for a specific purpose. I have three separate Mastodon accounts: one for general postings, one for posting photos only, and one for book reviews. Followers can choose which 'aspect' of me to follow and ignore the rest. This is unlike Twitter, where followers have no choice but to put up with my thoughts, book reviews and photos even if they are only interested in one thing.
- puyoxyz 4y ago
  You can have multiple accounts on Twitter; it’s allowed and even encouraged since both the mobile app and the web app have an account switcher, and TweetDeck lets you use multiple accounts at once IIRC.
  - sohkamyung 4y ago
    I never use Twitter apps, so I have no idea about TweetDeck's capabilities. If multiple Twitter accounts are encouraged, I've never seen the people I follow use it. They all post multiple kinds of things through one account, and never ask followers to follow any other Twitter accounts they may be using.
- rsolva 4y ago
  You should check out bookwyrm.social for posting book reviews! It is a federated Goodreads alternative that makes it easy to share my book-related activity via my Mastodon account, and to keep track of my reading progression, quotes, reviews etc. I REALLY like the idea (and practial implementation) of linking different domains of information together trough an open standard like ActivityPub!
  - sohkamyung 4y ago
    I have a Bookwyrm account. It's what I'm using to toot my book reviews. :-)
    - 4y ago
puyoxyz 4y ago
What!!! No!!! You’re not supposed to have multiple accounts !!! Mastodon federates !! The whole point is that you can have an account on one server and then follow and interact with people on other servers !! That is literally the whole point!!!!
rosmax_1337 4y ago
All social media plattforms that manage to fill their niche early and well, like twitter did, become natural monopolies. The main draw of the user to sign up for twitter, becomes the large user base, and people signing up for twitter enlargens the user base. All social media should begin to be viewed through this lens if we are ever going to make any progress with creating better online tech, because each and every single one of these monopolies are currently levereraging their positions in the economoy to influence politics and society at large in a very toxic way.

93 points by rzk 4y ago

rvz 4y ago

And it is not early days anymore. We have given it enough time to realize the claims as a Twitter alternative and it has simply failed. Twitter had tens of millions of users in its first 6 years. Mastodon is still struggling and considers 20 people as 'trending'. Mastodon is a total failure, and virtually no-one is there or uses it frequently or daily other than the general hyper tech-crowd and that is the fact. Regardless of the $48BN takeover, I'm already seeing the Mastodon circus running back to Twitter as they knew Mastodon was going the way of the Mastodon; extinction.

dumpsterlid 4y ago
My favorite part about Mastodon/The Fediverse is people like you think it is dead and hopeless and don't come there
- TylerE 4y ago
  Consider the feeling mutual.
  - dumpsterlid 4y ago
    Happily so!
- rvz 4y ago
  It is dead. Even the users who 'moved' to Mastodon came back to Twitter again are still posting on Twitter. Why? Because there is no-one on Mastodon even after the Twitter 'exodus'. We are talking 6 years and even less users using it. That sounds like a total failure on Mastodon's side to be a viable Twitter alternative.
  - elsjaako 4y ago
    I use it, and sometimes I unfollow people because the timeline gets to be too much to keep track of (so not dead). I have met people off it in real life. I also have a twitter account, that I use to follow a few (6 maybe?) accounts I care about. I scroll through that every week or two. I like those accounts, but twitter feels needy, constantly screaming for more attention. This is the website, not using an ad blocker. You say Mastodon is dead, so maybe you like a website constantly pushing you to engage more? I can understand how it would make the site feel more lively, especially for new users. Mastodon is not the same as Twitter, but there are plenty of us that prefer it. If you want 100000 followers it's the wrong platform, I'll give you that. > Even the users who 'moved' to Mastodon came back to Twitter again are still posting on Twitter. Why? Because there is no-one on Mastodon even after the Twitter 'exodus'. There have been many small exoduses, and some people stayed with Mastodon.
    - rvz 4y ago
      It is indeed dead. We have given it 6 years and little to no-one is on the platform. > Mastodon is not the same as Twitter, but there are plenty of us that prefer it. With the constant comparisons and mentions of Mastodon, being an alternative to Twitter even in its early days, it will be judged as so and my strict judgement is that it has failed. > There have been many small exoduses, and some people stayed with Mastodon. I'm almost certain that this year's Twitter exodus to Mastodon, that more than 90% of users who registered at the time do not use it regularly and have moved back to Twitter due to little to no interaction there. That is the fact of the matter after 6 years of operation.
slater 4y ago
Twitter doesn't have to "lose", for Mastodon to "win".
- naniwaduni 4y ago
  By virtue of the incumbency and respective "business" models, it is possible for Mastodon to not lose even as Twitter wins, while the converse is ... implausible.
lioeters 4y ago
Just because you are not there, doesn't mean other people are not. > My conservative estimate of current Mastodon network totals, based on my own stats aggregation, is 3 million registered users and 250k monthly active users. > - Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko (April 2022)
- TylerE 4y ago
  That sounds pretty dismal? E.g. >90% of "registered users" don't actually use the platform.
  - culi 4y ago
    Do you think Twitter or Facebook is any better?
    - TylerE 4y ago
      Yes? Facebook's MAU is almost half the world population. Hell, their daily active users is almost 2B.
      - ipaddr 4y ago
        Facebook claims 700+ million login daily but many are bots. It doesn't matter because you are not talking or interacting with them. You have a small list and unless you explore groups. Most of the world uses google search outside of China. I don't feel connected to them and if the volume dropped to a few hundred people using google search it wouldn't affect my experience. Facebook isn't a community site it is a social media with expectations that you consume more content than you contribute.
  - rvz 4y ago
    It's because it is dismal and Eugen is right as well and there is evidence supporting that [0] which it is still true to this day with the up-to-date instances that are active and with users who have logged in at least once over a week. 3,064,237 total registered Mastodon accounts and only 192,384 users using it. That is 7% of active users using the platform and 93% of everyone else not using it. There is virtually no one to talk to or interact with on the platform. This is enough to tell us that Mastodon is indeed a failure and has not replaced Twitter after 6 years of marketing itself as a Twitter alternative. [0] http://sp3r4z.fr/mastodon/accurate_user_count http://sp3r4z.fr/mastodon/accurate_user_count
betwixthewires 4y ago
It's not a failure. This idea that it has to be huge to be a success comes from the instagram, Facebook, twitter and YouTube way of counting success. 100 million views, 10k likes in an hour, 100k followers... these humongous numbers are not normal, and they're not necessary for a rewarding social experience online. In fact I think the opposite is true. Lots of people use the network daily. I do. It's more fun than twitter. You can experiment. You can say whatever you want if you pick the right servers. And you'll see people doing that, and saying things you don't like. And thats fine. I'll never use big corporate social media again in any form.
- rvz 4y ago
  > It's not a failure It is a failure. Having 3 million registered users and only 192,000 using it every month in the end after 6 years is more than 90% of all users not using it. With those numbers, there is virtually no-one using the platform which explains why many continued to keep posting on Twitter, more than on Mastodon. So it is still a massive and complete failure in almost every way. [0] http://sp3r4z.fr/mastodon/accurate_user_count http://sp3r4z.fr/mastodon/accurate_user_count
  - pgcj_poster 4y ago
    192,000 is not "virtually no one." There are a about dozen sovereign nations with fewer people.
    - rvz 4y ago
      > 192,000 is not "virtually no one." Yes it is, when compared to the total number of registered Mastodon users as I have mentioned from the start with "virtually" meaning 'nearly', 'almost', 'more or less', 'close to'. My use of the word could not get any more accurate and clearer. 192,000 of 3,000,000 is around 6.4%, where that is closer to 0 than 94% is, meaning that approximately 2,808,000 users are still not using it regularly after registration and after 6 years of existence, it has struggled with that ever since. You can try to deny it. But the numbers don't lie.
gargron 4y ago
Mastodon considers 20 people in a hashtag as trending because people don't use hashtags for new topics very often, and the hashtags that do get used often and regularly are exactly the opposite of "trending". And because trending data is somewhat limited by your server's view of the fediverse (each server calculates trends based on content from users it is subscribed to). Just 6 days ago somebody posted a poll asking people how often they log in to Mastodon [1]. 2,691 people responded to their poll, 71% answering "every day". Consider it was posted by someone with 201 followers, and people only had 6 days to respond. That, to me, is slightly more than virtually no-one. 2,859 sysadmins consider Mastodon worth running on their domain. I use Mastodon on a daily basis. I follow interesting people on it, I get more than my fair share of cat pictures through it, I find out about things happening in the world through it. I don't use Twitter. To me, it is a Twitter alternative, because it has replaced Twitter for me. Don't see what other claims there are to realize. [1]: https://todon.nl/@alternative_be/108894477425005957 https://todon.nl/@alternative_be/108894477425005957

margarina72 4y ago

But was it ever supposed to? If I remember correctly, one of the main element of the product vision was to allow better moderation, to have a "safer" online experience. Provided it is a very relative concept, the community approach makes a lot of sense. In a way, it is very similar to how forums used to be. Can it be improved? 100%. Many UX elements would make the product more popular, but was it meant to be a twitter replacement? not sure.

krater23 4y ago
It was in the first way really to cancel some other people talking about things that maiking you up? I think then, it should die immediatly. Sorry for my bad english.

rootw0rm 4y ago

whatever, still way more metal than Twitter

krater23 4y ago
you thinkn mental?

api 4y ago

Nothing can equal Twitter as the place for the rich and powerful to make complete fools of themselves. It’s got that niche locked down. Also seems to have the online lynch mob niche pretty solid. Mastodon is good for communities and tech chat.

sph 4y ago
Given the amount of times I see Mastodon threads posted on this forum (very rarely), I'm not sure it's good for tech chat. We talk about Mastodon the tech a lot, but I don't see it linked very much outside of meta discussion about the platform.

betwixthewires 4y ago

So I get the whole point of the article, I get the criticisms, and I get that nobody but the most technical minded, kool aid drinking fans of the technology care about what I'm going to say. Most of the problems listed are UI problems. You can use any client you want. A few shortcomings of all current clients, particularly application clients (not web clients) are the inability to merge timelines, the inability to create custom timelines, the inability to follow instances and the inability to remote follow (client only follow, your account isn't actually following). These are all things technically possible that expand the usability of the software but nobody seems to implement it. Beyond that, there's more than just mastodon there. And the network can replace twitter. And it will, either it or something like it. Twitter is a company, it has to show revenue to investors, which means it has a limited lifespan hardcoded in. It has to change things, which always means alienating users. An open network like activitypub on the other hand, can function just fine with 2 users for a hundred years before people start using it. It doesn't have to have growth, which means it can continue on indefinitely. Nobody has to change anything, but you can if you want. Open tools will, in all cases, supplant the corporate offerings they compete with given enough time.

INTPenis 4y ago

Whatever, ActivityPub is still a really cool thing. Just looking at the public timeline of a well connected AP node gives me hope for a user owned social media federation.

colesantiago 4y ago

It's sad that TruthSocial and some right wing instances in the past (like Gab once was) was one of the biggest Mastodon instances, this cements the main Mastodon instance as a very niche social network which the mainstream will never use. I don't think Mastodon can ever recover from this even with the so called 'migration' that happened because of Elon buying Twitter, I don't think that caught on to shift anything, probably only a small fraction of techies use the main Mastodon instance and that is pretty much it. TruthSocial makes this even worse.

chaxor 4y ago
It's a bit odd that mastodon is seen as a far right platform when Twitter is such an enormous company with corporate interests which will ultimately continually add features to alienate users, while the free and open source nature of mastodon is based in a much more liberal and progressive type of origin/framework.
- colesantiago 4y ago
  Doesn't change the fact that TruthSocial the right wing social network is one of the biggest Mastodon instances, federated or not. When I think of Mastodon I think of TruthSocial, the main instances have little to no activity, almost no reason to join any them.

kixiQu 4y ago

> a combination of Twitter’s chronological feed with the community-driven spaces of Reddit Eugen's product vision is fighting the "community-driven spaces" idea as hard as he can, as far as I understand – to the extent that that maps onto instances, and not the [groups that don't yet exist]. > But because each server effectively acts as a separate version of Mastodon, participating in multiple instances is a hassle. For each one, you must maintain separate profiles and follower lists, and there’s no way to view multiple “Local” timelines in a single feed. I agree that it'd be nice to be able to view other instances' local timelines. But from here on out, the piece gets real confused by its idea that this is the only way to use Mastodon and thus that you should have one account per instance – this is not how most people use Mastodon. > The mobile app isn’t really set up for hopping between instances, either. If you get bored with once instance and decide you’d like to check out another, the only option is to sign out of your account and sign up for a new instance from scratch. So... log on to your desktop and [move]. > The overarching issue here is that Mastodon is trying to be too much like Twitter when it really ought to be more like Reddit. If you want ActivityPub Reddit, you want [Lemmy], but with less FOSSy users. > In the ideal version of Mastodon, users would be able to browse the content of those communities, and jump between them at any time, but would still have easy ways to interact with anyone else on the network. This... is what I do. This is how I use Mastodon. This exists??? [groups that don't yet exist]: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/861#issuecomment-1135022537 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/861#issuecomment... [move]: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#move https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#move [Lemmy]: https://lemmy.ml/ https://lemmy.ml/

Alekhine 4y ago
> This... is what I do How do you do that? When I used Mastodon, I could only see my own instance's local timeline and the federated timeline. Basically, how do I Mastodon?
- arcatech 4y ago
  Follow people (including people from other instances) and then interact with them on your timeline just like you would with Twitter.

sylware 4y ago

waiting for a clean twitter alternative with nitter (=interop with noscript/basic (x)html browsers which twitter is unable to do).

egypturnash 4y ago

It's largely replaced Twitter for talking to a lot of my friends. Which is the only reason I ever joined Twitter in the first place - all their Livejournals got replaced by these autoposts of cryptic fragments of conversations, and I reluctantly followed them to this annoying world of ultra-short posts that just kept getting shittier and shitter as Twitter kept on trying to make it profitable. And I can preemptively block entire instances full of chuds for myself and everyone else on the instance I run. It's great. It's nice. It's kinda like the Internet used to be before Endless September started. I do think it could be a lot better if Eugen would stop trying to make it so much Like Twitter, I upped the post length limit to ~7k and it's fucking wonderful. I can have conversations with my friends. In paragraphs.

sph 4y ago
Please indulge me: what's wrong with email for talking to your friends? Unless you think your conversations have to be public for everybody else to see.
- egypturnash 4y ago
  Have you looked at your email inbox lately? Email is full of spam, and business, and businesses I dealt with in the past trying to entice me into giving them more money, and spam filters that can register false positives on stuff I do want to see. A non-profit social media site just has my friends, without any need to regularly spend time keeping up filters.
- arcatech 4y ago
  Public conversations is part of the point of social media.

oxff 4y ago

On a technical level it is easy to make a product that is better than Twitter: replicate it exactly but fix the complaints. The reason it is not getting actually replaced by another product is very simple: they can't move the community of Twitter there. Largest public place to go and make your political enemies seethe and cope in 280 characters or less.

okonomiyaki3000 4y ago

You don't need to replace Twitter. It doesn't need to exist in the first place. Just stop using it. Replace using Twitter with not using Twitter.

krater23 4y ago
ArboriaInstitut 4y ago
Over years on the platform I've built up a number of lists of people who I think have very interesting things to say on a number of topics. Where, outside of Twitter or a close replacement, could I find something like a thread delving into why Hollywood "antiwar" movies are actually usually a whitewash? https://twitter.com/mmabeuf/status/1324573014407729153 https://twitter.com/mmabeuf/status/1324573014407729153 Maybe this isn't the way most people are using Twitter though, I would agree that being off the platform entirely would be better than just letting their algos serve up content to you and becoming addicted to the dopamine rush of likes and retweets.
- nmeofthestate 4y ago
  >Maybe this isn't the way most people are using Twitter though No, I think almost everyone on Twitter is there to consume stuff that conforms with their worldview/politics, same as you.

somat 4y ago

Perhaps not for you, but for me, who has never been on twitter it does ok. That aside, The whole twitter style, shouting into the void, microblog communication platform is really stupid. When I decided to give mastodon a try because someone I know set up an instance devoted to a subject I enjoy. the whole experience was baffling and inefficient compared to other communications systems I have tried. I stick with it because local instance is only about 100 people and they are all good folk. I Have a hard time imagining how terrible it is to have the whole world on one instance and am rather happy that I passed on twitter.

Underphil 4y ago
I feel the same as you, but the article isn't aimed at us. It's aimed at people who do use it, and possibly rely on it for connections etc.

scrame 4y ago

good. Twitter is garbage.

system16 4y ago

Mastodon's biggest Twitter differentiator and feature - multiple instances - is also its biggest flaw when it comes to ease of use. Users don't "get" the multiple instance concept. The article is spot on in that it is disorganized and there is no easy way to unify your account across instances.

gargron 4y ago

The author seems under to be under the wrong impression that Mastodon servers are isolated communities (and therefore compares them to subreddits). This is incorrect. Mastodon is a platform where a server of your choosing hosts your account, like an e-mail provider hosting your inbox. From that account, you follow any other account on the network, regardless of which server hosts that account. Everyone you follow appears in your home feed, and everyone who follows you receives your posts in their home feed. It is unfortunately a common misunderstanding, and I must admit we didn't help the situation by leaning into calling servers "communities" on joinmastodon.org in the past (not anymore). There do exist plenty of "themed" Mastodon servers, aimed at specific communities, e.g. phpc.social which describes itself as a server for the PHP community, because some secondary discovery features of Mastodon lend themselves to what kind of feels like a slack/irc/subreddit, but ultimately, in their primary purpose, servers are service providers just like GMail/Outlook/Fastmail are for e-mail.

na85 4y ago
>The author seems under to be under the wrong impression that Mastodon servers are isolated communities (and therefore compares them to subreddits). This is incorrect. Mastodon is a platform where a server of your choosing hosts your account, like an e-mail provider hosting your inbox. From that account, you follow any other account on the network, regardless of which server hosts that account. Everyone you follow appears in your home feed, and everyone who follows you receives your posts in their home feed. I've been aware of Mastodon pretty much since its inception and I had no idea that this was the case. The messaging really needs improved.
- kevinmgranger 4y ago
  I remember early mastodon marketing being criticized for emphasizing federation _too much_, and that it would confuse new users.
- shadowfacts 4y ago
  The sixth sentence on the project homepage: "Joining a server on Mastodon provides you with the power to communicate with any server across the globe." Not sure how much clearer it gets.

jrm4 4y ago

An interesting thing: Twitter is literally experimenting with being more "Mastodon-like" with "Circles" Are there any paths or efforts toward the reverse? I know that's not the design but might there be some value, utility, and possibility in a more "centralized" Mastodon? Specifically, the value of centralization here wouldn't be governance, but analytics. Finding out what people are "mostly talking about" and perhaps getting more attention to bigger names. I know that's not everybody's bag but I think it would be valuable.

imwillofficial 4y ago

After mastadon started blocking stuff they didn’t like at the client level, I bailed.

elsjaako 4y ago
I think you are referring to some of the mobile clients not interacting with gab. This wasn't mastodon itself. It's an open protocol, anyone can write a client. If you're referring to something else let me know, I'd be interested.
- imwillofficial 4y ago
  Just because anyone can work around it, doesn’t mean they should have to. If the package maintainers themselves are censoring stuff as best they can, that’s beyond the pale. Gab had no more toxic content than any twitter thread on a contentious topic.
  - elsjaako 4y ago
    If MS Outlook started refusing to communicate with 163.com, would it be fair to say that email had banned 163.com? Would it be fair to say that email users had to work around this block? I think it's an issue with MS Outlook, not with email. AFAIK, the two apps that blocked gab were Tusky and Toot!. This isn't like all email clients were doing this. The other thing is that local server admins blocked gab en masse. This is why you should find an instance that matches your requirements.

BiteCode_dev 4y ago

I've had a mastodon account for years. Not only you can't get a tenth of the audience or quality publications you get on twitters, but also there is less diversity. A mastodon instance is often its own island, with one view of the world, and they don't connect to any other instances with a different view of the world because the others are intolerant assholes (but themselves are alright, of course). Ironic, given the protocol is made specifically to link instances together so that the network become more robust, and that people joined because it's a more open design than twitter. On the other hand, Twitter that is full of trends, SJW, extremists of all sides and censorship, manage to send me toward new paths of thinking regularly.

sph 4y ago
It's like the problem isn't the platform or the technology, but people aren't meant to voice their ideas for the whole world to see, anonymously. It's such a naive view that it's a good idea to attach a megaphone to anyone's mouth. The focus on decentralisation and not on solving the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory [1] means they focused on the wrong problem. They've just created an island for jerkwads that think they are better from the other jerkwads at the bird site. Now, I wouldn't be against a Twitter-like for direct friends. Like Google+ for a moment tried to do before it imploded. 1: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboards-and-other-anomalies https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...

ekianjo 4y ago

The author has probably not used Mastodon for more than 5 minutes to write such a ignorant piece about the network. The sign is that he talks about the immature Mastodon mobile app while unofficial clients have been around for years before, and are much more feature-full. If you don't know a topic, don't write about it.

berkes 4y ago
The author is an experienced 'new mastodon user'. And can therefore write about how it is for a new user to join. Much better than you or I (some 6years on the network, write software for the network) could ever do. Telling journalists what they may, or may not write, is always worrying. But telling they aren't allowed to write about problems they, from experience, see, even more so.

sohkamyung 4y ago

The good thing about having multiple Mastodon servers is you can sign up for multiple accounts (one on each server) and use each one for a specific purpose. I have three separate Mastodon accounts: one for general postings, one for posting photos only, and one for book reviews. Followers can choose which 'aspect' of me to follow and ignore the rest. This is unlike Twitter, where followers have no choice but to put up with my thoughts, book reviews and photos even if they are only interested in one thing.

puyoxyz 4y ago
You can have multiple accounts on Twitter; it’s allowed and even encouraged since both the mobile app and the web app have an account switcher, and TweetDeck lets you use multiple accounts at once IIRC.
- sohkamyung 4y ago
  I never use Twitter apps, so I have no idea about TweetDeck's capabilities. If multiple Twitter accounts are encouraged, I've never seen the people I follow use it. They all post multiple kinds of things through one account, and never ask followers to follow any other Twitter accounts they may be using.
rsolva 4y ago
You should check out bookwyrm.social for posting book reviews! It is a federated Goodreads alternative that makes it easy to share my book-related activity via my Mastodon account, and to keep track of my reading progression, quotes, reviews etc. I REALLY like the idea (and practial implementation) of linking different domains of information together trough an open standard like ActivityPub!
- sohkamyung 4y ago
  I have a Bookwyrm account. It's what I'm using to toot my book reviews. :-)
  - 4y ago

puyoxyz 4y ago

What!!! No!!! You’re not supposed to have multiple accounts !!! Mastodon federates !! The whole point is that you can have an account on one server and then follow and interact with people on other servers !! That is literally the whole point!!!!

rosmax_1337 4y ago

All social media plattforms that manage to fill their niche early and well, like twitter did, become natural monopolies. The main draw of the user to sign up for twitter, becomes the large user base, and people signing up for twitter enlargens the user base. All social media should begin to be viewed through this lens if we are ever going to make any progress with creating better online tech, because each and every single one of these monopolies are currently levereraging their positions in the economoy to influence politics and society at large in a very toxic way.