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Ask HN: Has Mastodon blown its big chance?

• smoldesu 4y ago
  People said this the last 4-5 times Mastodon had it's "big chance" and the platform still seems to be doing fine. Methinks the people on Twitter complain too much, but with any luck Twitter won't even be a platform going into 2023.
• PaulHoule 4y ago
  Mastodon can be successful for the people who use it even if it doesn't "make it big" enough to dethrone Twitter, Facebook, etc. There are longstanding challenges to marketing something like Mastodon. Call it the "fediverse" or "PubSubHubBub" and I think people's eyes glaze over. But it doesn't have to appeal to everybody, and it might be better if it doesn't... Wouldn't it be great if we could undo the "Eternal September?"
  • 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 4y ago
    Fully agree, I don't get this worldview where anything that does not take the undisputed nr. 1 spot is to be considered a failure. I created my Twitter account ~10 years ago, I had barely any noteworthy interaction on it. I used it mainly to follow interesting accounts and people, but it never managed to convince me to tweet a lot myself. On Mastodon I am more active than I've ever been on Twitter. This is of course also a side effect of it being new and exciting for many people. But what exactly do I get from Mastdodon becoming gigantic? All I need is a healthy, active userbase. I don't care if Mastodon ever "overtakes" Twitter, all I care about is whether Mastodon can cultivate enough active users to stay healthy.
• rektide 4y ago
  Excuse you? Rome wasnt built in a day, but you are "blowns it's big chance" posting after 1 week? And... it's numbers have "exploded". I think it's far too many months early to tell.
  • abirch 4y ago
    I'd be shocked if there wasn't a question asked like this circa 2005 if Facebook is so popular why does Myspace and Friendster have 100x the users?
• auct 4y ago
• jstgord 4y ago
  Au contraire.. I think it has been maturing slowly, quietly.. and now there is enough churn/pain on Twitter to overcome the activation energy hump of moving to a new platform. We need a social network to share short texts which cannot be easily turned off at the whim of a billionaire [or a government for that matter ] - Mastodon could be that thing, could grow into that thing, so is worth trying. It also doesnt have to be perfect or complete to succeed - we can fix things and scale as we use it. Our individual choices are a vote for the future we want - getting there is a noisy stochastic process.
• 8bitsrule 4y ago
  For the people already using it regularly, it's doing something right. It's a good thing it's not push-button easy, or the tsunami might have drowned it. Most of them would leave anyway ... not enough sugar rush.
• abirch 4y ago
  Most overnight success stories take years of work.