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Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

• athesyn 4y ago
  doesnt seem like many when you realize there's only 300k verified users, and they're part of the base that generates the most content/engagement. it really doesnt take a lot of users to destroy twitter.
• ben30 4y ago
  Has anyone tried making a twitter clone by saying, hay sign up to us, port over your twitter handle by tweeting that your moving to us. Give no option to make new handles on the twitter clone, you must be on twitter first.
• bravetraveler 4y ago
  Only 70k? I saw spam about "finding my Twitter friends there" for days on several of the common websites I did, turns out they're in my phone :D
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• cloutchaser 4y ago
  How many conservatives are still on Twitter complaining about censorship, rather than using Gettr or Parler or Truth Social? Network effects are WAY stronger than we think. Also, if you built a following on Twitter over 10-15 years, leaving it is a massive sacrifice. I wouldn't bet on an actual twitter exodus.
  • gerikson 4y ago
    I think many are getting a fedi account "just in case".
    • pseudo0 4y ago
      Mastodon is still littered with dead accounts from the last "exodus" so I'm not holding my breath.
  • candiddevmike 4y ago
    I feel like if people truly cared about what you had to say they would seek you out regardless of the platform. Follower numbers are glorified internet points meant to keep you engaged/chained to the platform.
    • cvwright 4y ago
      Yes but how many Twitter accounts are truly in that category? One former president has kinda sorta managed it, and he was in the news every single day for years. Who else could achieve even his limited level of success? Maybe Barack Obama?
    • tsol 4y ago
      I think this is too simplified. For example, I don't care much for Stephen King(he's a great writer horror just doesn't do anything for me), but I still heard what he has to say on this due to it being posted on twitter. I pay attention because I know he's a significant person. I wouldn't seek him out otherwise, but because he happens to be in my network I pay attention to him even though I don't consume his works. Without that large network, the only people seeking him out will be fans. There are at least two negatives to that. The audience is smaller, and there's less exposure to non-fans
    • aikendrum 4y ago
      There are countless people who I couldn't enumerate who I might be potentially interested. I don't want them 'recommended' or algorithmically forced on me, but retweets and quote tweets have effectively surfaced their work over time. I absolutely don't want to have to do that again and again across social network. Twitter 'mutuals' aren't like facebook friends. They're a two way asynchronous conversation with a pool of people with varying relationships of wildly different kinds. Many of whom are pseudonymous.
  • mempko 4y ago
    Except history is littered with dead social networks that were once huge. People said the same thing 'network effects' yet phase shifts happen. Don't just bet on twitter staying twitter.
• chiefalchemist 4y ago
  It's impressive how quickly those bot accounts can jump ship. Now Mastodon use them to juice their growth figures. p.s. They gained accounts. That's not the same as actual users using the platform.
  • moooo99 4y ago
    Mastodon is a not for profit project ran by many community members in a federated fashion. What do they have to gain by „juicing“ their growth figures?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • chiefalchemist 4y ago
      I don't follow your logic. That makes them holy? Ego-less? Better than the rest of us? Evidently, they gain media favor. They were the source of those figures, yes? So why even say anything? Not-for-profit !== higher calling. It simply means a different set of financial and ta rules. Nothing more. Nothing less.
• halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
  70k is a grain of sand relatively.
  • croes 4y ago
    It depends on the kind of users. Twitter has only 300k users with a blue check. If 70k of them would switch to Mastodon it would have a bigger effect.
    • kingkawn 4y ago
      If my mother had wheels she would’ve been a bike.
    • mattl 4y ago
      Several of us have.
    • the_third_wave 4y ago
      The term "Blue Check" or "Blue Checkmark" is not exactly a term of endearment so seeing those move to other networks certainly will have an effect. As to whether that effect is a positive or negative for Mastodon remains to be seen.
      • Pxtl 4y ago
        Twitter's main value proposition is that there are VIPs and lesser Internet Famous people to follow on there. There are far better platforms for conversations, but most of those don't give you access to journalists, creators, politicians, etc right down to your local community. A huge number of those VIPs have blue checkmarks.
        • the_third_wave 4y ago
          > A huge number of those VIPs have blue checkmarks. The problem does not lie with the verified identity identified by the blue checkmark but with the fact that many if not most of those "Blue Checks" are hell-bent on "following the narrative" wherever that may lead us. It lies with their vacuous virtue signalling and their "let them eat cake" discourse. They will fly the flags needed to show they are loyal, they will modify their bio to add the required shibboleths while living the good life in their personal enclaves of prosperity, guarded and manicured and pampered.
• MichaelZuo 4y ago
  It's difficult to see the value in spending time on Mastodon, compared to other services. For example, just checking joinmastodon.org gives the following top 10 recommended options: " GENERAL INVITE ONLY snabelen.no Ein norsk tenar for den desentraliserte sosiale media platformen Mastodon Get on waitlist 1.8K GENERAL INVITE ONLY mastodontti.fi Tämä on suomenkielinen Mastodon-instanssi. Julkisten päivitysten tulisi olla suomeksi, mutta käyttäjät voivat olla mistä vain. Oikeakielisyys ei ole tärkeää, joten tuuttaile vapaasti, vaikka olisitkin vasta oppimassa suomea. Get on waitlist 2.8K GENERAL mastodon.iriseden.eu Instance Mastodon hébergée en France chez OVH et maintenu par @iriseden Join server 2.4K GENERAL INVITE ONLY sociale.network Sociale.network è una iniziativa dell'associazione culturale altrinformazione.net e dell'associazione peacelink.it Get on waitlist 2.4K GENERAL pouet.chapril.org Chapril, membre du collectif CHATONS, un projet de l'April. Join server 1.4K GENERAL INVITE ONLY mast.dragon-fly.club 这里是属于每一个人与众不同的岛屿，然而每座岛屿间却又紧密相连。来建设专属于你的岛屿吧！在这里找到一个不一样的自己。无论世界多么纷纷扰扰，在这里，总会有你所向往的一片宁静…… Get on waitlist 2.5K GENERAL INVITE ONLY mastodon.zaclys.com Bienvenue sur l'instance libre et française de Mastodon ! proposée par Zaclys.com Get on waitlist 16K GENERAL mastodon.bida.im Un'istanza mastodon antifascista prevalentemente italofona con base a Bologna Join server 880 GENERAL INVITE ONLY tooot.im תוות.ים הוא שרת מסטודון הפונה לקהל דוברי העברית. Get on waitlist 3.4K GENERAL INVITE ONLY masto.nobigtech.es Instancia de Mastodon principalmente en español/castellano que se aloja en Bilbao, Pais Vasco. Get on waitlist 2.6K " Which pretty much sound like a list of Discord or IRC servers except the non-english ones are not filtered out. So it's a bit weird why it's advertised as a Twitter replacement at all. Clearly competition will balkanize everything into thousands of mostly invite-only niche servers. Maybe it makes more sense as an IRC or Discord replacement?
  • smileybarry 4y ago
    Just a note -- your URL is wrong and redirects to a site blocked (entirely) by my adblocker. The right domain is dot ORG, not COM: joinmastodon.org
    • MichaelZuo 4y ago
      Thanks, updated it.
  • 4y ago
• tptacek 4y ago
  That's 0.003% of Twitter's "monetizable" daily active users.
  • bfgoodrich 4y ago
  • kibwen 4y ago
    Rather than counting users, I'll be more interested to see if any specific communities actually manage to collectively transition to another service. It's not 2006 anymore, nobody makes an account on Twitter because they want to "microblog" about the sandwich they had for lunch; no, you make an account on Twitter because, say, you're a ML researcher and all the prominent ML researchers are talking on Twitter. If the prominent ML researchers leave, then to an ML researcher doesn't matter how many users Twitter retains, because the ML crowd will follow the core. Conversely, even if Twitter were to lose 99% of its users, if the core ML researchers stick around then the ML community would also stick around.
    • UncleMeat 4y ago
      I suspect that this framing will make the number feel even worse. The number of complete (or even majority) communities that this 70k number represents is surely very nearly zero.
      • kibwen 4y ago
        It could be better or worse. Communities tend to follow their core members. If those 70k users were the most connected and central nodes in any of Twitter's thousands of subcommunities, it would precipitate a significant shift. But if those 70k users are leaf nodes, then it will amount to no change as far as Twitter is concerned.
    • camjohnson26 4y ago
      A big chunk of the $TSLAQ community moved to Discord, but the experience is very different. For context these are the people who took early bets against Tesla and have been calling out its unethical practices. A lot of people are understandably nervous about continuing that research on a platform owned by its CEO.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• vander_elst 4y ago
  That's about 0.018% of total twitter user base (assuming total user base = 396.5 Million, 0.018 = 100*70K/396.5M). In relative numbers that's very little.
  • multiplegeorges 4y ago
    How many users generate content and value for Twitter? Maybe 500k/day? It's a lot in terms of value generation.
    • remram 4y ago
      Do we know if the 70k are part of those? Do we know if they are stopping using their Twitter accounts now that they have Mastodon accounts?
• philipov 4y ago
  The most important quality I hear people are looking for in a replacement for Twitter is "Everyone else is on it" so they're all stuck in a catch 22. I don't think this energy to get off Twitter is going to go anywhere.
  • miohtama 4y ago
    Like with everything else that is large, any shift will be slow and gradual. You are right saying that any “surge” is not going to last, but it does not mean the change won’t happen. Everyone else was stuck on Facebook 5-8 years ago, but many people from my age group rarely go there anymore.
  • overthemoon 4y ago
    This is true until it isn't. I expect that if Twitter dies, it won't be a mass exodus, but a thousand cuts. It's not dying tomorrow, but in my opinion its days are numbered. And I don't mean just because Musk took over, although he's made some decisions already that make no sense to me. It's got issues. People WANT an alternative.
  • kibwen 4y ago
    I think it's a mistake to think that Mastodon would necessarily be the beneficiary of any Twitter exodus. I think it's more likely that the beneficiaries would be established, centralized services like Discord or Reddit. The underlying media models may be different, but I suspect people care less about the model than about seeing things they're interested in, and plenty of these people will already have accounts on these other major services. (Some people use Twitter less for "participating in a specific niche community" and more for "building a personal brand", but there are other centralized services that provide that as well, like Instagram).
    • philipov 4y ago
      People aren't looking for Reddit or Discord. They already have these. The people using Twitter to promote their business-of-choice are already on Reddit and Discord if they want to be. They don't want Twitter because it's a good way to host their communities, they want Twitter for cross-promoting their community to other communities.
• beprogrammed 4y ago
  I'm looking forward to clients and services built around the at protocol https://atproto.com/ https://atproto.com/
  • remram 4y ago
    Why?
    • beprogrammed 4y ago
      User controlled cryptographic identity management, distributed hosting, it's a protocol not a platform, you know...all the good stuff
      • remram 4y ago
        All this applies to Mastodon/ActivityPub except the crypto stuff
  • myself248 4y ago
    +++ ATS43=65 That'll confuse 'em real good
• rsynnott 4y ago
  Hmm, I wonder do they mean mastodon.social, or the whole network. I was trying to find network-wide stats and couldn't (it's a difficult problem, I suppose, in that it's not _really_ a single network).
  • gpm 4y ago
    It's barely responsive right now, presumably because it's getting hammered with traffic, but this site has some stats: https://the-federation.info/mastodon https://the-federation.info/mastodon It shows an increase in total users of more like 230k
• kingkawn 4y ago
  I joined mastodon. Every instance I joined was full of posts about how good mastodon is, but there was no other content or conversations. I quit mastodon.
  • cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    Not my experience, because I went and looked for interesting people and followed them. Through hash tags and looking at what other interesting people were 'boosting', etc. Honestly, it's up to you to go find interesting people and follow them. There's no engagement "algorithm" like Twitter. That's a good thing, but yes, it does require an initial time investment. It's not a twitter replacement. I never had twitter in my life -- on purpose -- so that's not how I think of it. It's more like FidoNET or Usenet of old. Which is fine with me.
• VectorLock 4y ago
  People used to think the network effect for MySpace and Friendster were insurmountable. I played around with Mastodon last night and I think it has some bad but not insurmountable ergonomic wrinkles, but I worry its decentralization will prevent it from ever becoming mainstream. Centralization makes it easier to deal with "bad" actors. Also Discovery is a huge problem: how do I discover people I know? How do content creators who want to build an audience (and so create content that would attract users to the platform) get discovered? I think discovery is a bigger catch 22 than "nobody is on it."
  • WorldMaker 4y ago
    > Centralization makes it easier to deal with "bad" actors. Moderation is a problem that scales terribly. We haven't actually solved moderation at scale, no matter how many algorithms and ML models we throw at it. That was part of the ridiculous opening salvo by Musk, if you'll recall, that Twitter was full of unmoderated bots and if they just sent him a ton of their data his engineers would find a better way to moderate over lunch. They did and his engineers didn't and he reneged on the deal at that point and became a morass for the courts. Moderation is labor. The number of moderators you need per volume doesn't scale well, no matter how many tools you throw at it. This seems to be the repeating lesson of both Twitter and Facebook. We have too much data from Facebook that auto-moderation tools plus scale make the labor of moderation terrifyingly worse: instead of moderation being a continuous background process of seeing 97% fine posts and the occasional 3% of bad actor posts, moderators are fed streams of the opposite: 97% content from bad actors. This has huge mental health issues with many reports of PTSD and worse from Facebook's human moderators. Decentralization necessitates more moderators and naturally spreads out the work of moderators to give individual moderators less to do "in their local neighborhood". It returns to a background activity where moderating the bad actors is a small effort compared to other things going on in an instance. Instances may be invite-only, further minimizing the role of a moderator on a small instance versus the threat of bad actors. Reports of bad activity often get seen by at least two moderators: a moderator on your local instance and a moderator on the remote instance where the bad actor is. Mastodon provides a number of tools to moderators on both sides of that: the local moderator may silence all of a bad actor's content locally and can escalate that to silence or blocking a remote instance if the implication is the remote instance tolerates too many bad actors. The remote instance can put bad actors on probation or kick bad actors. Most of these tools are both quite easy to work with and powerful enough for most needs on Mastodon today. Decentralization also shrinks the "blast radius" of a potential bad actor: bad actors can create all the instances they want, certainly, but if no one is following those instances, does anyone really notice? It's a tree falls in the forest problem. There's often a lot of "fediblock" drama when new instances from entirely bad actors show up, but often the "fediblock" messages themselves are much more viral than any possible bad actor (because admins/moderators care for each other in a decentralized manner). > how do I discover people I know? How do you discover someone's email address? How do you discover someone's blog? How do you discover someone's mailing list or Discord or YouTube Channel or Twitch Channel or …? Discovery could obviously be better on Mastodon, but discovery is also an on-going process people do decentralized all the time, through word of mouth, through friend's recommendations, through other channels, through in person events, through friends' retweets (boosts in Mastodon) of other interesting people that they follow. Some of the "huge problem" of discovery on Mastodon has nothing to do with Mastodon and everything to do with network effects. Not enough people use Mastodon so not enough people think to put Mastodon handles on their business or social cards. Not enough people think to add "follow me on Mastodon" after the usual "Like and Subscribe" in a YouTube video. Etc and so forth. From a network effects perspective discovery on Mastodon isn't a bigger catch-22 than "nobody is on it", discovery on Mastodon is the exact same catch-22. That's what makes it a catch-22: nobody is on Mastodon so nobody is talking/sharing about Mastodon so nobody is on Mastodon. Discovery on its own isn't a catch-22, it's a bootstrap problem. It's network effects that make discovery a catch-22. > How do content creators who want to build an audience (and so create content that would attract users to the platform) get discovered? How does anyone market anything on any platform? Discovery is marketing. Marketing is getting discovered. It's no different and arguably much better than (from a tooling standpoint) from the early days of Twitter when hashtags were just a search convention and not a built-in feature. All the usual tools from Twitter generally apply to Mastodon: virality and hash tags. Going viral is much harder on Mastodon with no "algorithms" to cajole and machines doing your work for you, just people to convince to boost you. Also, yes, there are a lot of instances that are defiantly allergic to obvious and outright marketing for major corporations or celebrities or general "influencing"/brands/branding. (Though many of those same instances adore small creators working independently and who wear their hearts on their sleeves, so long as they keep their marketing "human" and plain dealing and don't spam it.)
• SuoDuanDao 4y ago
  sounds like a win-win to me. I doubt I'd agree with many of the people who left Twitter on much - I might actually start using Twitter now - but I admire their willingness to stand by their beliefs and I'm sure Mastodon will be better for their arrival.
• Pxtl 4y ago
  I got a mastodon account on the mastodon.social instance years ago and took another look recently. I still can't figure it out. I see people say they're moving to mastodon, try to search for them on the platform, and find nothing. Possibly they're on another instance that's not searchable from mastodon.social, or their name is different, or the search is bad... But the end result is I can't find anybody there.
  • aikendrum 4y ago
    This was my experience also. The 'migration' tools are very poor.
  • remram 4y ago
    Maybe they are lying about it. When I announced I was getting a Mastodon account, I linked it, I didn't leave people to guess.
• sebow 4y ago
  Pretty sure more than that re/joined since twitter's acquisition was confirmed. If you count the numbers since this whole ordeal began months ago, I'd say it's a pretty low chance Twitter is gonna "die" or get "tumblr"'d. They began stagnating years ago but this is at least gonna drag it for years to come. If Musk plays it right it might even grow (assuming meta's endeavors stay the same).
• lostgame 4y ago
  Ha! I was one of them. I never even used Twitter, but a nerd friend of mine told me about the Fediverse told me about it and I actually got quite excited. Find the right server and it seems like a great place to be!
• Zigurd 4y ago
  I have used Mastodon and had my own server for a while. I should take a second look. But a quick look makes me think that, unfortunately, proprietary new platforms like Tribel are more polished.
• Sin2x 4y ago
  • ceejayoz 4y ago
    That doesn’t make sense. ”Mastodon” isn’t a single entity. My just-for-me self-hosted instance certainly doesn’t have censorship.
    • Sin2x 4y ago
      You are literally one search query away from it making sense: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28495086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28495086 http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2737/FP_6.pdf http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2737/FP_6.pdf There was a huge uproar about it a couple of years back. EDIT: https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/jkiw1y/can_someone_explain_how_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/jkiw1y/can_someon... Gab was "banned" in that the vast majority of instances blocked it and blocked any other instance that didn't do the same. If that's not censorship, I don't know what is. You can have your sandbox but you can't play with others unless you accept their censorship rules and politics.
      • ceejayoz 4y ago
        > You are literally one search query away from it making sense... No, that doesn't make it make more sense. You're saying Pleroma instances cannot decide to de-federate with a specific instance, and can't remove/moderate posts? That seems... unlikely.
        • Sin2x 4y ago
          I'm saying that censorship is ingrained in the Mastodon culture and is considered normal and necessary. Considering that Pleroma is also technically superior, I don't understand why one would prefer Mastodon over it, except popularity which is not a merit.
  • the_third_wave 4y ago
    I assume you mean a specific instance running the Mastodon software, most likely mastodon.social?
• jmbwell 4y ago
  How did they count? How can you count new users between one date and another date, across the entire fediverse?
• beanjuiceII 4y ago
  70k users doesn't seem like that many...and I am not sure I'd call them "users" yet, technically I'm a "user" but I checked it out for a few months here and there and don't plan on ever going back. The entire experience felt really clunky to me and moving the pin seems like a tough pull that would take quite awhile. but you know just my opinion!
  • Nic0 4y ago
    70k! whoua, twitter is in trouble. It might be a good rise for Mastodon, but the fact is that 70k user-ish is nothing in social-media-scale.
  • chipgap98 4y ago
    A small fraction of Twitter's users create most of the value of the Twitter network. Given that, I think the interesting question is what segment do those 70k fall into?
    • somedude895 4y ago
      Probably not the people who would lose most by leaving the huge audience that Twitter offers.
    • cmh89 4y ago
      Considering you can have a not repost everything you tweet on Mastodon, it doesn't seem like all that much commitment to be in both places.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    • corobo 4y ago
      Same with when GitHub annoys everyone and the folks pop up announcing their move to GitLab. The segment that makes up the dramatic reaction is the same segment who can move without issue. No stars, no followers, no real reason to be there (specifically) if we're honest. I think this is a mild marketing opportunity for Mastodon, a big old nothing for Twitter.
• jstx1 4y ago
  Can someone explain how Mastodon works? Right now I can sign up at twitter.com and get to see and talk to everyone else who has signed up - where do I sign up for Mastodon and do I get to interact with everyone else who has done the same? (the fact that this needs to be explained at all should already be a hint that it will never be mainstream)
  • Macha 4y ago
    Mastodon.tech and yes (unless they've been banned) There's no reason the answer needs to be more complicated than Twitter. Options exist, but in the literal ELI5 explanation people can already figure out "how do I message my friend who uses a different phone manufacturer than I do" without a long detailing of the inner workings of signal, or iMessage or whatsapp
    • Zak 4y ago
      The irony here is that Mastodon.tech is not running Mastodon. It's running Pleroma. That's fine though. Pleroma speaks ActivityPub so you can network with everyone who's using Mastodon, but calling it "Mastodon.tech" is weird.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  • remram 4y ago
    > the fact that this needs to be explained at all should already be a hint that it will never be mainstream Ah yes, because users are incapable of learning anything at all
    • throwayyy479087 4y ago
      Yes? If you want to compete with Twitter you have to be usable by the bottom 5%, not just the top 20%
    • anotherrandom 4y ago
• readme 4y ago
  To those who say Twitter has such expansive network effects it can't be replaced AOL was replaced Twitter is AOL QED
  • tenpies 4y ago
    All those cases are replacement via competitor. This seems like a completely different case unless the Leftists execute what they told the Right-leaning users all these years: "just build your own Twitter".
• jmartin2683 4y ago
  Is that significantly more than average over the same time period? Would imply a fairly low adoption rate even at that peak, if it was one.
• sz4kerto 4y ago
  Do people remember all the posts about people migrating to GitLab when Microsoft has bought GitHub?
  • mountainriver 4y ago
    Wonder how that worked out lol
  • whoooooo123 4y ago
    They probably moved to the same place as all the people who said they'd leave the US if Trump got elected.
    • throwayyy479087 4y ago
      Austin?
      • anotherrandom 4y ago
        Most of those people were there before 2016
• jokethrowaway 4y ago
  Considering Elon Musk is likely to revert the ridiculous censorship that went on at Twitter, rhe people leaving twitter are the ones who want censors. Kind of ridiculous for them to go to Mastodon where decentralisation makes banning harder. They will be exposed to - the horror! - other people's ideas!
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• andrew_ 4y ago
  I registered an account just to park my usual username. I have basically zero interest in participating.
• ChoGGi 4y ago
  Twitter might MySpace? That's terrible.... Next!
• buovjaga 4y ago
  70k probably comes from this posted on 30 Oct: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109254422325596095 https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109254422325596095 Increase since 27 Oct Twitter deal closing seems to be over 200k at this point: https://the-federation.info/mastodon https://the-federation.info/mastodon Another stats page for fediverse in general: https://fediverse.observer/stats https://fediverse.observer/stats
• m3kw9 4y ago
  Pretty much zero sum game when you go mastodon or twitter and that’s hard to surmount
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• carbonatedmilk 4y ago
  For comparison, the old, dying, 'legacy' social media platform Facebook added 24MILLION new users in the same period. https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly... To rub it in - If Facebook & Mastodon were the only two social networks to 'switch' to, FB captured 99.8% of the 'switchers'. If 24 Million new users had signed up for Mastodon, that would be a story. That only 0.2% of them chose Mastadon shows how bad the open, federated alternative really is.
  • 411111111111111 4y ago
    No, it doesn't show that it's bad. It only shows that basically nobody knows that they exist, which is basically a death sentence for social networks. Nonetheless, the distinction makes sense as otherwise you're just opening the doors to endless discussions about what is "better".
  • memish 4y ago
    To add to that, how many did Twitter gain in that same period? There are people whose follower counts increased dramatically, which would suggest there was a large influx there too.
  • Kadin 4y ago
    > Facebook added 24MILLION new users in the same period Of those 24M users, how many of them are people I care about or want to follow? I.e. not bots, not people on the other side of the planet, not people who don't have a language in common with me, etc. etc. A network with 10,000 users, 10% of whom are interesting enough for me to want to follow, is much better than a network with 1M users but only 0.1% are people I'd care to interact with.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• racl101 4y ago
  Elon puts on Infinity Gauntlet: "Time to buy it."
• cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  Up to date stats from "Mastodon Users @mastodonusercount@bitcoinhackers.org" from 1h ago: 5,823,653 accounts +1,487 in the last hour +28,688 in the last day +186,724 in the last week For comparison, it looks like a month ago it was more like a few dozen new users an hour. Now it's over a thousand each hour and generally climbing. Not saying this rate of increase will continue, but it's definitely a huge spike.
• linsomniac 4y ago
  I've been pondering: If 1% of Twitter users move to Mastodon, can it even handle it? 1% is ~4.5M users, currently the entire Fediverse is around 5.5M users, so that'd be nearly doubling. In looking at the server lists when I tried to sign up, many of them were closed for invites and mastodon.social where I had previously signed up wouldn't load the homepage. Sounds like the mastodon.social admin is ordering new hardware. The article mentions an admin of 80K users spending 300+euro/mo, extrapolate that out to 4.5m users and that's 17Keuro. Not trying to FUD here, just thinking about what it would take to get Mastodon to take over.
  • ryan29 4y ago
    I don't think anything built on traditional tech will catch on. Whenever I see anything touting decentralization, I always look at the setup instructions because I think the setup complexity will dictate the adoption potential. With Mastodon, it looks like Ruby on Rails, Node.js, PostgreSQL, and Redis for the backend stuff. For me, the only realistic way I'd run a node would be via Docker (Compose) which means I'm limited to something non-redundant (ie: no HA) that only scales vertically, at least easily. > The article mentions an admin of 80K users spending 300+euro/mo I think it's well understood that centralized systems win because normal, non-technical people don't want to deal with the complexity of managing their own servers and that devolves into the situation like the one you pointed out where normal users consolidate on a single node and the owner of that node ends up stuck with all the cost, moderation, maintenance, etc. The thing that I think isn't considered enough, or at all, is that decentralization of control doesn't need to mean decentralization of infrastructure. Imagine something like Mastodon but built with newer tech that makes it deployable to Cloudflare, Netlify, Vercel, etc. Think along the lines of using something like SvelteKit + adapters. I can see all of those infrastructure platforms getting to the point where a custom deployment could be distilled down to something as simple as installing an app on a phone where the only thing you need to do is feed it a domain. As long as it's federated using a custom domain, making it simple enough for a normal person to run an instance increases the decentralization of control which is more important than decentralizing the infrastructure in my opinion. I think one of the main things that we need to make that more realistic is for someone like Cloudflare to provide a local runtime for their core services (Pages, Workers, Functions, KV, R2, etc.). Having something vertically scalable is adequate because that's no worse than what most of us get with a Docker based deployment which is the maximum complexity most people will be willing to deal with, at least the people I know. The other thing that would help a lot would be if those companies I mentioned collaborated to have deployment compatibility. IE: I should be able to write one app and deploy it to any one of them as long as I use a standard set of features. I think that would be amazing from the perspective of being a customer / dev, but I don't know how realistic it is on the business side of things.
• wintermutestwin 4y ago
  Honest question: Can someone who actually uses and gets value from Twit please explain the use case and value? I totally grok interest-based social, but I do not at all understand why I would want to put effort into figuring out personality-based social (beyond family/friends/blogs/etc) - particularly when posts are limited to bumper sticker lengths (unless they are just URLS to rich posts hosted elsewhere, but that's just link aggregation, which Reddit does better). Bumper stickers back and forth are not real conversations either - why wouldn't I just go to reddit or forums or even IRC (which I guess is now Discord)?
  • stiltzkin 4y ago
    The same you find using HN, by your preferences and algorithm Twitter puts you in contacts with other people with the same interest and have conversation, Reddit have most of the communities but it has its downsides as pro-leftist and censored. Musk want to make it neither too left or right.
  • tensor 4y ago
    Think of it as a socially driven RSS feed. On the one hand I enjoy following e.g. Science magazine directly. But the social part is that I follow people who post things they find interesting and often I find those things interesting as well. It's not really a platform for discussion as much as sharing links to content.
    • wintermutestwin 4y ago
      So it is really a link aggregator with a focus on personalities more than specific topics. Did I interpret you correctly? If so, I think I'd much rather get the content from a topical aggregator (reddit/forums/blogs). I am interested in such a wide variety of topics that it is much easier to organize my browsing time by topic.
  • beeboop 4y ago
    The people I know that use Twitter a lot are doing it mostly for conversation with a semi-known group of people around a niche topic (usually politics). Reddit is too anonymous and it doesn't allow you to hold grudges and be rude and mean to people with a known set of beliefs.
• Jayab 4y ago
  I was technically a user of 4 other platforms, but left after a week of trying them out. Like Americans who visit Mexico, not many choose to actually move there, most go back to the US.
• asim 4y ago
  Federation isn't going to be everyone moving to a decentralised platform like Mastadon. It's going to be groups segregating to different platforms based on their interests and values. Whether or not that network of things becomes interconnected, not clear, maybe not. We'll see some churn from Twitter but the majority of people with 10k+ followers will stay. Every engineer feels they could build a Twitter alternative, purely on a technical basis, but to actually draw a community there, that's the harder part. What Jack is trying to do with Bluesky is more interesting, an actual protocol as opposed to another platform, but again not clear that will work out either. SMTP was truly the greatest communication protocol of all time, and then HTTP being an information protocol somehow subsumed that for social purposes. If we just assume public social is Twitter, Facebook, etc, then private social might end up being some smaller niche systems and then we may end up with some alternative new protocol for real time communication. Something dead simple is likely to beat out the wholly thought through in the beginning because clients could be easily implemented for it.
• macinjosh 4y ago
  Twitter has some pretty terrible content on it but I rarely encounter it. When I tried Mastodon most of the posts I was exposed to were in a language I could not identify, some sort of anime based post (often pornographic), spam, or just random people I've never heard of talking about there last jog or meal. Not a great experience yet.
  • timbit42 4y ago
    Mastodon has a lot more popularity in Japan than anywhere else.
• agumonkey 4y ago
  allegedly 1M users in 2018, and in april there were already 30k new users spiking after the first musk/twitter annoucement.
• beeboop 4y ago
  Why is this a "takeover" and not a "purchase"? I assume because the Guardian has an axe to grind
• intel_brain 4y ago
  This will never replace twitter. If you want to use federated platform, you might as well go back to using individual blogs and RSS feeds to follow them.