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What do you think is the main issue with Mastodon not really getting mainstream adoption? Not different enough than Twitter or too different from it? Not enou

• Macha 4y ago
  Network effects of twitter. Your friends are already on twitter if they still use this style of broadcast text based social media. Also recent privacy concerns and less recent issues with internet hostility means we're already past peak twitter, so mastodon is having to break into a declining market.
  • k__ 4y ago
    Hm, in the past many social networks came and go, so I think there should be more to it than "network effects".
  • mattl 4y ago
    It's also less about my friends being on Twitter and more about the people who aren't my friends being on Twitter too...
    • k__ 4y ago
      Yes, so probably a marketing thing.
      • mattl 4y ago
        I see few communities outside of open source and adjacent being interested in Mastodon because it’s hard to find the people there. Even a technology related post will get much bigger reception on Twitter.
• tomphoolery 4y ago
  1. as mentioned earlier, network effects of twitter 2. you can just sign up for twitter, you don't need to pick an open instance run by some stranger. 3. deploying a rails app isn't trivial, mastodon being written in rails and dependent on multiple DBs makes it harder to install and thus harder for people to run their own server. As we continue to improve computing power and efficiency, I think the idea of using a federated social network so you can "own your data" is going to become less and less attractive. If you take this concept to its logical extreme, eventually everyone will run their own social networking server, and we'll be interconnected with each other through some kind of DHT magic. After all, the fediverse is still "someone else's computer", it's just that "someone else" in this case is some guy and not a for-profit company. It doesn't really solve the problem.
• thrdbndndn 4y ago
  IMHO, its decentralized nature just isn't compatible with most user, or the concept of social media. It works for certain demographics but not most.
  • mariusor 4y ago
    I bet the numbers of email users is larger than the individual ones for each social network. (a quick search says that the number of email accounts is estimated at ~4billion, and the most populous "social network", TikTok has an estimated at ~1billion users)
• rvz 4y ago
  All of the above, plus little to no-one actually bothered to use it daily, with not enough users to even talk to and compared to Twitter, Mastodon has an extremely limited network effect. This explains why they have keep pulling content from and why they keep using Twitter and not the other way round.
  • shadowfacts 4y ago
    Lots of people use it every day: myself, the people I follow, a lot of people who follow me, countless others I don’t interact with. Yes, the network has few users compared to twitter, but it’s a far cry from “little to no-one”.
  • gargron 4y ago
    Mastodon does not pull content from Twitter.
    • rvz 4y ago
      No, Mastodon 'users' have to keep linking tweets from Twitter in Mastodon more frequently and it is not the other way round on Twitter.