25 ms·

Mastodon hit 10M users

493 points by xena 4y ago

th4row 4y ago
Can someone explain what's the benefit of ActivityPub/Fediverse for forums? I mean, if you want descentralization isn't it easier to have different forums in different domains, like we had in the 90s/00s? This feels like a solution looking for a problem. If I was a betting man, I'd bet that this concept will eventually die.
andrewfromx 4y ago
what are the other competitors close to these numbers? I think: https://www.deso.com/ https://www.deso.com/ https://nostr.com/ https://nostr.com/ https://urbit.org/ https://urbit.org/
- hprotagonist 4y ago
  no way urbit has anything close to 10M users, surely.
- xiphias2 4y ago
  Nostr is not there in numbers (just hundreds of thousands), but growing super fast, and the clients can't be compared to what they were just a month ago in stability. BTW Nostrica (the first ever Nostr conference) is going on right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NueacYJovA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NueacYJovA
- yuppie_scum 4y ago
  www.twitter.com
  - andrewfromx 4y ago
    very funny, not decentralized.... yet!
- rakoo 4y ago
  XMPP
  - andrewfromx 4y ago
    but c'mon jabberd has been around forever and it's not making waves like Mastodon. Why?
    - codebje 4y ago
      XMPP (née Jabber) isn't a broadcast messaging platform like Twitter or Mastodon, it's a one-on-one or small group instant messaging protocol. It absolutely failed to take off as a broadly decentralised instant messaging service, for a bunch of reasons, but it absolutely succeeded in becoming a widely used instant messaging protocol, at least for a while. Jabber was born in 1998, in a world where there was a handful of centralised desktop instant messaging apps that didn't interoperate at all - ICQ and AIM dominated, but there were plenty of others around too. Most of us ran multiple apps at once, or tried to get clients that could connect to multiple services, but this was complicated by proprietary and frequently changing protocols. A decentralised, federated, and open protocol that let users connect to all other users was a great idea… for users. But it didn't do anything for the behemoths rapidly gaining users in their proprietary centralised systems, and it didn't do anything for ISPs who'd just have to run, and support, another service. Early clients and servers weren't as straightforward as downloading a desktop program from Tucows and running it, and in the space of technically savvy people running a system built on open standards there was already a well established (and heavily fractured!) IRC. XMPP's standardisation in the IETF didn't really help it. While the IETF isn't quite as slow as more traditional standards bodies it's definitely nowhere near as fast as centralised companies with only one client implementation to care about. As the war for eyeballs heated up, instant messaging apps rapidly added features like sharing images (crazy! over _dial-up_?) or emojis (before they were called emojis!) and XMPP simply did not keep up. Nevertheless, XMPP was the basis of iChat (or at least, some versions of it) until iChat was killed in 2011, and the basis of Google Talk until that was killed in 2013. It wasn't too uncommon for corporate internal chat platforms to be using XMPP in one form or another - Cisco still have a product today called Cisco Jabber. But the main thing all of these systems had in common was they absolutely sucked at federating with each other. Theoretically Google Talk supported it, but your corporate system probably didn't. iChat notionally might've but as far as I recall it had so many proprietary extensions and missing standard features that it just wasn't feasible to federate. XMPP did pretty well for a stretch being the underlying protocol for a bunch of proprietary, centralised, and siloed chat systems. In the end mobile phones killed instant messaging platforms. In the 90s most of us didn't have phones, but at the start of the century that rapidly changed and suddenly we all had the same instant messaging platform right in our hands: SMS. Sure, it was never built for heavy use, and mobile companies often charged per message (50c per text in Australia in the early 2000s), but it was _there_ and everyone was on it, and in just a few years desktop instant messaging died off. XMPP never had a chance. Smartphones, of course, re-introduced the hot mess of a dozen competing instant messaging platforms with different parts of your social network on different ones, all centralised, all proprietary.
tus666 4y ago
TBH I thought it would have been a lot more than that.
Method-X 4y ago
Doesn't look like there are many active users.
- benatkin 4y ago
  Perhaps. Anecdotally, I was 5 times as active on twitter as I am on Mastodon. Now I am not on twitter at all. So I'm more active on Mastodon than on twitter right now, but not super active. If you think that's a victory for twitter, fair enough. It got so much critical mass that it's hard to replicate off of Twitter. But as weeks keep passing by without me going back to twitter, I think that's a win for Mastodon.
  - smcl 4y ago
    This is the same as me. I switched from Twitter to Mastodon, use the platform less overall but am happier as a result.
- krapp 4y ago
  Mastodon isn't designed to incentivize the addiction loops that drive traffic on Twitter and other social media sites. Quality over quantity isn't a bad thing.
- jghn 4y ago
  I almost never log on to my Mastodon account. When I do, I always say I should do so more as the vast majority of the people I really enjoyed following on Twitter are on there. But the thing is, I just hate the Mastodon UI. It's so clunky. And the lack of things like centralized search are a big issue for me. I dislike the federated nature of it. In short, it's just not to me. Which sucks, as that's where a lot of the content I want to see currently lives. But such is life. Meanwhile, even though my Twitter feed is a shell of what it once was, I wind up there several times a day. And it's not "because of the algorithm", I have been using the algorithm-free feed for years now.
  - seba_dos1 4y ago
    > But the thing is, I just hate the Mastodon UI. Which one?
davnicwil 4y ago
Anyone know how a decentralised system like mastadon can meaningfully assess user count? In terms of accounts corresponding to real, distinct people? And has such an analysis been done to produce the numbers this account is reporting?
- noarchy 4y ago
  >Anyone know how a decentralised system like mastadon can meaningfully assess user count? In terms of accounts corresponding to real, distinct people? Can Twitter even manage that, given the well known issues with bots?
- jonas-w 4y ago
  https://github.com/gallizoltan/usercount https://github.com/gallizoltan/usercount The bot is open source, it crawls the list at https://instances.social https://instances.social and checks on each instance how many users they have and how many toots (statuses) they have.
- numpad0 4y ago
  Twitter users are routinely making new sub-accounts to manage persona and relationships, so social media account counts don't correspond to skull counts anyway. Hacked Mastodon instances may report entirely bogus numbers too. But humans are nice, generally speaking... it should work as an indication that there are most likely more than few millions who've signed up at at least one of these instances.
- thejohnconway 4y ago
  Mastodon instances report their user user stats via the API. I have a bot the polls about 9000 server federated with my own and just adds them all up. It’s always incomplete, however, because non-Mastodon Fediverse applications like Pleroma and Misskey don’t report user stats.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  I assume it's not a particularly exact science; in particular it would definitely miss completely defederated instances like Gab and Truth Social, but also likely a lot of small federated ones.
rvz 4y ago
10 million 'registered users' not 'daily active users' in 7 years. Even in some of the comments in the post are skeptical about the usage of those registered accounts. In comparison to Twitter (Since Mastodon zealots often pitch it as a 'Twitter alternative' somehow) 7 years after it launched, it had well over 250M+ total users with well over 150M daily actives. [0] Even Nostr has 6M total users in less than 7 years. [1] Either way, total registered number of users tells us nothing about the usage of the network. Yet we have daily actives much less than 1.5M with a large drop in users this year since they don't stick around on Mastodon. [2] It only tells us that there are very loud crickets screaming about migrating to Mastodon which accounted for less than 1% of Twitter's total number of users. (And most of them never stuck around) 7 years is not early days with this. Matrix launched in 2014 and reached 10M in less than 5 years and multiplied by up to 8x to 80M in less than 4 years [3] and it is highly competitive against Signal. There is no excuses for such sluggish user numbers for Mastodon with even less monthly active users. Thus, I think we have given Mastodon enough time and it is clear that it hasn't taken off. Perhaps it is time to stop pretending about users caring about signing up to a over-engineered discord forum promoting pseudo-federation. [0] https://backlinko.com/twitter-users https://backlinko.com/twitter-users [1] https://stats.nostr.band/#total_users https://stats.nostr.band/#total_users [2] https://www.wired.com/story/the-mastodon-bump-is-now-a-slump/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-mastodon-bump-is-now-a-slump... [3] https://news.itsfoss.com/matrix-sixty-million-users/ https://news.itsfoss.com/matrix-sixty-million-users/
- gyudin 4y ago
  +1 Even monthly non-unique visits continue to decline. 6.9M in November, 3.9M in December, 3.4M in January. And personally every time I’ve tried to use it didn’t work properly as people would have problems with hosting and supporting it for free.
  - jeromegv 4y ago
    Where are you getting the non-unique visits data?
- tptacek 4y ago
  The years Mastodon operated before Musk chased millions of people off Twitter don't count. In the status quo ante of Musk's takeover, Mastodon may never have been viable, but Musk did take over Twitter.
jonas-w 4y ago
It's interesting that there are normally 10.000-40.000 [0] toots per hour and it skyrockets up to 8.000.000 toots per hour in this graph, how is this possible? [0] based on a graph before these huge spikes https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/110030252165962978 https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/11003025216596297...
- thejohnconway 4y ago
  That bot is notorious for spurious spikes, often making the graphs unreadable. It’s open source, but it’s using an API, not doing its own polling, so it’s hard to dig into what’s going on.
unpopularopp 4y ago
Are the undesirable instances included in this? Edit: seems like they aren’t. So probably there are more users and the 10m have been passed long ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- the_third_wave 4y ago
  > the undesirable instances Which would that be? Undesirable by whom? Who gets to decide whether an instance is "undesirable"? I'd think that what is undesirable to one is the bee's knees to the other. Who is to be the arbiter of desirability? In a truly distributed system the answer would be 'nobody - everybody'. Are you talking about instances which are blocked in the source code of Mastodon? Blocked in some of the clients? In that case the answer is 'those who created those blocks'. Are they to be the arbiters then?
  - not2b 4y ago
    There are some sites running forks of Mastodon code that intentionally don't federate with other sites. Trump's Truth Social is one. They don't count because they aren't part of the network.
  - smsm42 4y ago
    > Which would that be? Probably those sites that "zero toxicity" people declared toxic and mandated to exclude from the fediverse where everyone is welcome. I remember this discussion a while ago and it was one of the main reasons I lost my interest in Mastoson (second being I see no reason to try to fit my thoughts into the format of one yell - I prefer more deliberate discourse) - it felt like they are too much concerned with exclusion rather than inclusion. There are tools to ensure you don't fail to block something that all right thinking people are blocking: https://github.com/Anthchirp/mastodon-defederate https://github.com/Anthchirp/mastodon-defederate
  - numpad0 4y ago
    If GP meant 2nd and 3rd largest instances, Pawoo and mstdn.jp - those are on the https://instances.social/instances.json https://instances.social/instances.json that is supposed to be the data source, with 839k/338k users with 70M/65M statuses respectively. Along the mastodon.social with 1M users and 53M statuses, the top 3 account for 2.2M or 1/5th of claimed 10M users... But something seems off. "users" key on that .json only adds up to 7816421, not 10M. There has to be either a data error, or couple elephants in the room totaling at 2.2M, or the long tail that isn't loading for me.
dom96 4y ago
Shameless plug: I created a browser extension to help transition to Mastodon[0]. If you don't yet feel like you can leave twitter.com, but want to explore alternatives it's a great way to get started. Essentially it injects Mastodon posts into your Twitter timeline, so you can retain your existing Twitter following while getting exposed to Mastodon. [0] - https://chirper.picheta.me https://chirper.picheta.me
- Hamuko 4y ago
  That sounds kinda backwards. If I'm staying on Twitter, what's the value-add from having Mastodon posts there? I've witnessed very few individuals drop Twitter completely in favour of Mastodon.
  - dom96 4y ago
    The value add is that you can be a part of Mastodon without having to learn how to use the Mastodon UX. Just one way to increase Mastodon usage for those that like Twitter UX and don't want to have to remember to visit Twitter and Mastodon.
nforgerit 4y ago
After about 6 months hosting my own little private Mastodon instance, I can say the following things: (1) Whoever cares about that but the atmosphere is nice, cozy, exciting and creative. Zero toxicity and probably several magnitudes more meaningful conversations with people from all around the world. This apparently comes from the kinds of people I could find and connect with. (2) Hosting is relatively easy. I think all kinds of organizations (e.g. sports clubs, media companies, private companies, schools, political parties, gov't agencies, etc.) should give it a shot hosting their own instances to take control of their social media identity. They don't necessarily need to open registrations for everyone and start moderating "the masses". I only let few hand-picked people on my instance that I happen to know IRL and still have a happy life. (3) I once saw a post from a German IT mag (heise, I think from November 2022) that claimed that they have more traffic through Mastodon than through any other Social Media thingy. Surely, their audience was a good fit but I think it's a matter of critical mass when more less-nerdy people would join the Fediverse. In summary, I deleted my Twitter account ~2 months ago and don't regret it. Some things are a bit annoying (mostly bugs, finding and connecting with other people, not much interaction with my posts [maybe it's because my posts are sh*t]) but all in all it's a great resource for inspiration and digital interaction with other people.
- haunter 4y ago
  > Zero toxicity ymmv. The mastodon.lol (which was a safe space instance) drama over Hogwarts Legacy [0] was a very good reminder that the platform doesn’t matter, its the people. 0, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195
  - benatkin 4y ago
    > the platform doesn’t matter, its the people. Neither mattered in that case. It was just a conundrum. Something a lot of people wanted to boycott had a AAA game built for it. I assume you're coming on the side of Nathan, but can't you see why people were going to have a strong reaction about posts about the game surfacing in the feed? It was a wedge issue. I'm not on either side, except I am against those who actually threw those insults at Nathan, which I'm pretty sure were a tiny % of the people who disagreed with him. I think if they had merely expressed frustration about the situation but not gone off the handle the same thing could have happened, albeit more slowly.
EamonnMR 4y ago
Being able to follow just hashtags and users and never getting recommended garbage is very nice. I mostly just use Twitter to follow Dril now.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  I'm sure Twitter will kill them one of these days, but services like https://bird.makeup/users/Dril/remote_follow https://bird.makeup/users/Dril/remote_follow exist, which allow you to follow Twitter users on Mastodon. This has the downside of missing interactivity and incomplete reaction chains, but as someone who's usually not interested in either it's been good enough for me to remove Twitter from my pinned tabs.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  In what way would that be different from the Twitter "Following" feed?
  - jeromegv 4y ago
    Lots of spam on twitter nowadays, so following a hashtag might lead to a lot of garbage. And the other difference obviously is ads, you read 5 tweets and get an ad in the following feed.
jackvalentine 4y ago
I have been using https://streetpass.social/ https://streetpass.social/ to find more mastodon users - it uses the ‘verified domains’ thing in mastodon in reverse - you go to a website and if it is verifying a mastodon profile it gives you a link. I’ve been very surprised how many people and organisations are on the fediverse.
starkparker 4y ago
10 million accounts != 10 million users
- kornhole 4y ago
  Right. I have three accounts myself: The first is personal with my real name that I generally post to followers only who are people I know. The second is a professional focused identity for business topics. The final is a pseudonymous account for political stuff I don't want showing up on a deep background search from employers or intelligence agencies. It is kind of a replacement for Zuckbook, Lockedin, and Twitter accounts.
jacooper 4y ago
Honestly I really tried to use the fediverse, but its not good enough. Search is hot garbage, can't find anything useful, or what people are actually talking about, not that Twitters search is great by any measure. Missing content when visiting external content, cuz why would anyone ever want to see or search old content. Also most clients I have seen show replies in a really stupid way, you have to actively click to see what the person is replying to, its not visible in the timeline. Outside of the English speaking indie-privacy-tech bubble (and germans seem to be very active on it too) its a ghost land. In general I have been spending more time on hacker news and youtube than Twitter and fediverse, they aren't like pre-elon twitter.
- MisterSandman 4y ago
  Is search really that big of a deal? > Outside of the English speaking indie-privacy-tech bubble (and germans seem to be very active on it too) its a ghost land. "Outside of the super-active communities using Mastodon everyday, it is a ghostland."
  - illiarian 4y ago
    > Is search really that big of a deal? Yes. From finding things to searching archives etc. Tim Bray has a good post on the topic: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/12/30/Mastodon-Privacy-and-Search https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/12/30/Mastodon-... (you can skip to the very last section if you don't want to read it all)
  - jacooper 4y ago
    These communities are active if not more active on Twitter. One of the things that made Twitter good is that every niche uses it.
  - Hamuko 4y ago
    >Is search really that big of a deal? I used Twitter search constantly.
  - crazygringo 4y ago
whywhywhydude 4y ago
I wish they changed the name to something better. Would probably increase adoption greatly if they can come up with a name that doesn’t sound like a porn site specializing in bondage.
- iz_zi 4y ago
  It’s all good if you need something more vanilla there is discord.
- spicyusername 4y ago
  How does "Mastodon" evoke that for you!?
  - malwrar 4y ago
    Mastodon looks like “master-dom” or “masto(urba…) dom” or similar. I also have experience with people giving a weird eye when I mention the name, it’s not pen island or anything but it’s close enough to have caused nonzero issues.
    - LBJsPNS 4y ago
      If people are giving you a weird eye over the name Mastodon, I would say it has much more to do with them than with the nane.
- smsm42 4y ago
  TIL a large prehistoric elephant is somehow closely associated with bondage porn. Will the wonders never cease.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    A "large prehistoric elephant" isn't really a good name for a social platform either.
- xigoi 4y ago
  The fact that you see the name this way says more about you.
cogwheels 4y ago
That ten million figure includes the many of us who created an account on some instance, had a browse around for a few minutes, realised it was a boring wasteland of a service, and never logged on again. Let's see the data for active users, not just registrations.
- thejohnconway 4y ago
  Active users is probably around 1.6-2m for Mastodon, and maybe another million on top of that for Mastodon-compatible Fediverse software like Pleroma and Misskey (they don’t report active users).
6ak74rfy 4y ago
If you are considering self-hosting your instance, I’ll recommend Go To Social. It is still alpha quality software but all the basic functions work fine. But it’s a much lighter alternative to Mastodon.
- konart 4y ago
  From their blog (https://gts.superseriousbusiness.org/@gotosocial/statuses/01GS15VTW657H4XGB1BKFRTEDZ https://gts.superseriousbusiness.org/@gotosocial/statuses/01...): >We do not work with transphobes/fascists/racists. If you open an issue or PR on our git repo and we see you are one of those things, or hang out with people like that, we will kick you out of our space. We have no patience for bigotry, and we see no reason whatsoever to tolerate having it anywhere near us. Fuck terfs and fuck nazis. >we are a strictly antifascist organization. we have zero tolerance for fascism or anything that enables or allows it. (yes that includes capitalism) I'd honestly rather stay away from people who claim they are "antifascist organization" but at the same time have zero understanding what does "nazism" or "fascism" actually means. Nor do they have any kind of FAQ on how they are going to determine who is what and how should I know if somebody I follow on fediverse or github is one of those things.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
    Imma be honest with you it has never occurred to me that I would legitimately be considered a transphobe, racist, fascist, or nazi. And if someone sincerely was informing me I was doing this to the point where they could no longer tolerate my presence I would take some serious time to introspect what I did and potentially reach out to a neutral third party like a therapist to figure out if I have to do some work on myself. Basically I wouldn’t worry about a stance like that, because either it will never apply to me or if it does, I can take it as a fairly low-stakes learning opportunity! (It’s not like I’m losing my job, getting divorced, etc. from this!) (I would consider it a similar hardline stance to, idk, “we do not work with human traffickers, if we think you’re pro human trafficking we’ll avoid you” or “we do not work with serial killers, if we think you’re pro serial killer we’ll avoid you”. Like I know I’m neither of those things, and if people think I am, holy shit!! I need to fix that asap!!)
stevebmark 4y ago
This is sad to see. Mastodon is already dead. It's fundamentally impossible for it to catch on with a wider audience. Right now the only platform worse than Twitter is Mastodon. Whatever the Twitter replacement is, we haven't found it yet.
- glass3 4y ago
  Where is the fundamental limit? It's a protocol. Somebody could create an instance that does everything right for mass adoption.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    Focusing on the "protocol" is the limit. Nobody among regular people cares about the protocol, they care about a social media experience on-par or better than what they're currently using. If they have to figure out this whole technobabble mess that is the "fediverse" it becomes a non-starter.
    - glass3 4y ago
      Yes. That would be doing it wrong for mass adoption. Doing it right means that users don't have to care about the protocol. But there still has to be infrastructure. Instead of reinventing the wheel, a new social network could be built on the Mastodon foundation. There would already be users and there would be an exit strategy for power users if the new network fails. Right now, it's not worth investing time in a new network because the social graph doesn't survive the end of the network. With Mastodon, it would be easy to migrate to a new service.
- krapp 4y ago
  I agree. Mastodon is dead. You definitely shouldn't bother. In fact, everyone here complaining about how the platform won't put up with their edgy anti-woke shenanigans should just stay away. You're all too smart and cool for such a lame place.
  - LBJsPNS 4y ago
textread 4y ago
Putting this into context:- Twitter currently has ~400M users, 50% of them DAUs [1] [1] https://backlinko.com/twitter-users https://backlinko.com/twitter-users I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. ~ Nelson Mandela
- input_sh 4y ago
  Except it's not currently, it's from over a year ago ("Updated Jan. 05, 2022"). Back when Twitter still had an obligation to share DAUs because it was a public company. Nobody outside Twitter knows the current amount of DAUs. Whichever number you find post Q3 last year is a pure guess.
- phplovesong 4y ago
  Like FB there is most likely millions and millions of bot accounts. When in doubt, go with the 80%/20% rule.
phplovesong 4y ago
I applied for mastodon, but never got an confirmation. I think the tech has some serious bugs, and afaict needs polish. When users cant sign up theres red flags going on.
- klntsky 4y ago
  Just call their 24/7 support over the phone line.
- dym_sh 4y ago
  > I applied for mastodon which server? there are multiple server-side platforms too, incl. some forks, so if mastodon.social is not for you – look around for better lighter alternatives (as well for self-hosting) start around here: https://github.com/emilebosch/awesome-fediverse#applications https://github.com/emilebosch/awesome-fediverse#applications
  - phplovesong 4y ago
    Literally one of the first ones i found in mastodon.org. Clicked "tech" servers, then browsed until i found fosstodon.org, which seemed like the best match for my own preferences. So signed up, and still nothing. This was months ago, so i have pretty much given up on the entire thing.
    - dym_sh 4y ago
      if all you wanted to do is look around, it is understandable why giving up was this easy. honestly, if github and HN suffice for all your social needs, you probably dont need anything else. microblogging is not for everyone. but for others, since twitter is just no longer viable, people have been migrating to something that can't be just bought out by yet another rich asshole. plus privacy, extended control over your own data, and all that other nerd shit no one cares about.
      - phplovesong 4y ago
        I really dont care that much. To be honest i just wanted to "try it out", and also i cant stand twitter, its just such a echo chamber, and is full of pro russia trolls and trumpists, so i gave that up too. Im sure the trolls will migrate to mastodon too, sooner or later.
lazzlazzlazz 4y ago
Individual Mastodon instances have already begun exhibiting insane behavior, and relying on someone else's fiefdom isn't for me. Social media should give full control to the user on top of a credibly neutral layer.
- berkes 4y ago
  > Social media should give full control to the user Are you implying this isn't possible with Mastodon/ActivityPub?
  - KoftaBob 4y ago
    It's possible if users host their own Mastodon instance, which for the vast majority of users is way too much of a hassle to do. This is one of the reasons I think the nostr protocol is a better way of building a decentralized + censorship resistant social network. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#the-problem-with-mastodon-and-similar-programs https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#the-problem-with-mas...
    - berkes 4y ago
      Activitypub > Mastodon. While it currently indeed is rather impractical and even unattainable to run your own instance, it's by no means impossible. The protocol has no opinion on it¹. ActivityPub is more complex than nostr (I've built software for both) but not fundamentally different. Neither nostr nor activityPub have fundamental properties that make it possible or impossible to be fully P2P or fully centralized. Nostr can easily become centralized. AP too. But ActivityPub can operate in a P2P nature - where every user == a server just as well as nostr can. Practically, Mastodon is the default for AP, and thus dictates the use and shape. But I run my own gotosocial AP server, which is both simple, lean and clean. So already it's practically possible to run an AP server on tiny hardware with hardly any maintenance overhead. ¹EDIT: AP just describes an "inbox/outbox" with a PUB-SUB mechanism over HTTP. HTTP requires some discovery (dns), but that does not require fixed servers/domains. One could theoretically have an "inbox" (http-endpoint) on their mobile phone, bypassing the need for a server alltogether. Nostr is much simpler, it has that going for it, certainly! But when people say that nostr is "p2p" and AP isn't, that only describes the current state, not their fundamentals.
6510 4y ago
Thanks Elon, you've single-handedly made the internet a better place.
jokoon 4y ago
Who moderates this when content is reported? Can mastodon detect porn automatically and hide it? Anybody can build a social network today, the most difficult task is and always will be moderation.
- red_trumpet 4y ago
  Every instance has its own moderation, there is no central moderation. Porn is not detected automatically, but most instances require you to put it behind a content warning. Then it will not be shown automatically, you have to click to view it.
- mxuribe 4y ago
  If you run your own instance of an activityPub server - e.g. mastodon, gotosocial, pixelfed, etc. - for, let's say, yourself or your family, then you will have vastly more capabilities to moderate content (way easier and more reliable than relying on others to do so). If your next question is: why do i have to moderate the content myself? ...Then, your expectations are not aligned with (and/or you misunderstand) the greater fediverse's design. I think the kids would say: "You're holding/using it wrong." ;-)
app4soft 4y ago
> Mastodon hit 10M users Not a users, but accounts. 45% of 20 people that took part in my poll[0] has 2..4 accounts on various Mastodon servers (I has 3 accounts). [0] https://fosstodon.org/@app4soft/109885069770027479 https://fosstodon.org/@app4soft/109885069770027479
- toomim 4y ago
  And many accounts are not active. I would hazard a guess that of these 10M accounts, less than 1M are active users--making the submission headline very misleading indeed.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    It's misleading if you think of it as an investor filing. Ooh, how are they calculating revenue per user?? Directionally, it's good news. More self-selecting into using Mastodon, hopefully for non-nefarious purposes (advertising, influencing, blowhard-ing), will lead to more conversations.
- bombcar 4y ago
  This is the proper way to deal with almost ANY social media, unless it is literally one-purpose like HN; you should have various accounts for your various persona and they shouldn't cross.
tinyhouse 4y ago
It had an opportunity to take over Twitter but it's just not ready for main stream. The user experience is too confusing and too much for the average user.
tiborsaas 4y ago
Any statistics on the demographics?
tonystubblebine 4y ago
Regardless of this horse race coverage, I’ve been having a really good time on Mastodon. It’s much less toxic than Twitter and it’s easy to get into interesting discussions with smart people.
- kertoip_1 4y ago
  If you know who to follow. It's still much to be done with account recommendations
baxuz 4y ago
Can someone please explain how Mastodon is anything else except Reddit with more hoops to jump through? You have users, subreddits (servers), and mods. Except everything is federated, so you also have the overhead of choosing your server or making a ton of alt accounts. Flashback to old MMO times.
- d1sxeyes 4y ago
  By the same token, you could say 'how is Hacker News any different to Reddit except there are no subreddits?' You say you have the 'overhead of choosing your server', but then you have a similar overhead with every post on Reddit—choosing which subreddit to post it on. You absolutely don't have to make a ton of alt accounts, that's sort of the point of being federated. You create your account on a server of your choosing (even one you own/manage), and then you can follow anyone on any server (even those not using Mastodon, provided they're using an ActivityPub compatible server, such as Pixelfed which is similar to Instagram). Mastodon encourages short form microblogging with individuals who know each other interacting on all sorts of different topics. Reddit encourages link sharing or longer form posts with communities of like-minded pseudonymous users. Both platforms can be used for both use cases though.
- jeromegv 4y ago
  Reddit is thread based. This is more like a feed. I see it more like a decentralized twitter than a reddit with hoops.
- aktenlage 4y ago
  There are no up and downvotes, so it's purely chronological. There are Hashtags. User mentions are more common.
  - Pxtl 4y ago
    Likes/favrs are basically upvotes, really. The like count isn't displayed up front but it's there.
- Pxtl 4y ago
  It's very different. Servers are not subreddits -- your account lives on a single server, for example. In fact, the fact that servers are both the auth/identity system and topic-based moderation is imho one of the biggest design weaknesses of mastodon. Anyhow, it's more "federated Twitter" than anything else. Particularly early twitter before the quote-tweets, algorithmic feed, and other modern features.
pictur 4y ago
is mastodon content indexed somewhere? i.e. is it possible to do a general search and find shared stuff? i've never used it, just asking because I'm curious.
- jeromegv 4y ago
  It's on the web for the most part, indexed by Google. ex: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amastodon.social+hacker+news&client=safari&rls=en&ei=j18YZNqKAYC5qtsPitGauAQ&ved=0ahUKEwiajvDAzur9AhWAnGoFHYqoBkcQ4dUDCA8&uact=5&oq=site%3Amastodon.social+hacker+news&gs_lcp=Cgxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAQA0oECEEYAVDbBljxImDFI2gBcAB4AIABQIgBiwWSAQIxMpgBAKABAcABAQ&sclient=gws-wiz-serp https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amastodon.social+hacke... The search within the app is mostly not working and crap, unless you use hashtags (and the toots were created with hashtags)
cbeach 4y ago
I'm probably listed among those "10M users" I checked out Mastodon for an hour or so, saw less engagement than Twitter, more of an echo chamber, and a generally inferior user experience. Now I don't actively use it. It's sad in some ways, because I think centralised Big Tech (as a general concept) is undesirable. But to break the network effect, alternatives have to be much better. Also I'm concerned about Mastodon shared, curated blocklists. People who express unconventional/inconvenient viewpoints will not be safe on a decentralised network that has anti-free-speech, groupthink authoritarian mechanisms. (Yes, I know I wouldn't be forced to use a shared blocklist on my own Mastodon instance - but the problem is that my instance would be vulnerable to the whims of those who curate shared blocklists).
adithyassekhar 4y ago
Yes the echo chamber social media.
jrm4 4y ago
For what it's worth, my Mastodon experience. Broadly, I think the best use of Mastodon IS to be a Twitter competitor; a noisy town square. What I have seen is -- the disagreeable people on Twitter want to publically fight. They want to push their bad ideas and have everyone listen to them, and thus are willing to get into it. The disagreeable people on Mastodon want to silence others. They're more block happy and don't want to be questioned at all. That's why, presently, I prefer the disagreeable people over at Twitter; they're actually using the platform better (and you can possibly change their minds) I do hope this changes.
- troad 4y ago
  Mastodon, like Twitter, is full of people saying extreme things for attention, but it differs from Twitter in that there's no one to make fun of those people, because that would be 'negativity'. For that reason, I tend to find Mastodon feeds absolutely insufferable.
- rchaud 4y ago
  Mastodon is not a commercial entity, it doesn't have to compete with Twitter any more than my alumni.university email has to compete with Gmail. Mastodon offers a simple solution to stay out of the text wars, one that Twitter wouldn't dare offer: "turn off reblogs". Half the people I follow retweet/boost things I find irrelevant (personally). I can turn that off on Mastodon to reduce the noise. I can't on Twitter because then I might spend less time on the app, robbing them on precious ad revenue.
  - detaro 4y ago
    Twitter has that feature.
  - jrm4 4y ago
    The problem is, it's not a very good "solution" because reblogs was also a useful feature in spreading certain kinds of information. In my opinion, Twitter was (and is) instrumental in effectively highlighting certain kinds of important, unrecognized, "news," e.g. police brutality. I'm glad Mastodon folk are considering effective ways to reintroduce it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
TRiG_Ireland 4y ago
I'm on Mastodon, but I find the experience extremely frustrating. The UI has all the annoyances of Twitter's (which I also dislike), and more besides. It's a fun enough place to mess around and post throwaway jokes, but using it for anything serious would be a mistake: federation means that often only some of the posts in a given thread make it to your server, so often bits of a conversation are silently missing. This can lead to all kinds of miscommunication, misunderstanding, unintentional offence, and talking at cross purposes. It is, to my mind, a massive design flaw. (The fact that most servers have a fairly low character limit for posts, but allow chaining posts together to make threads is another problem, inherited from Twitter. It's harder to write; it's harder to read. It's harder to read even if all the posts in a chain federate to your server, which they may not. Individual posts in the middle of a chain may surface on the timeline out of context and make no sense. The entire structure is ridiculous, irritating, and pointlessly difficult to use.)
- swayvil 4y ago
  The Mastodon/Twitter format lends itself to a bite-sized form of conversation. Consumed and replied to in a moment. It optimizes for something I'm sure. Maybe "conversation volume" It's popular.
- rchaud 4y ago
  I used a FOSS android app called Tusky and for the most part I can't tell the difference between that and Twitter.
  - TRiG_Ireland 4y ago
    I asked a Mastodon howto question, and got an answer almost immediately. A week later, someone else helpfully provided the same answer, because the previous answer had not federated to his server. It's not a matter of which app you use: conversations will silently be missing bits.
DeathArrow 4y ago
Those 10M users are in fact 10M accounts. Given that some people have multiple accounts, given that some accounts are for bots, given that some people opened accounts just to test it and never to be seen again, real active users might be a lot less than 10M.
DeathArrow 4y ago
I don't get what problem Mastodon is trying to solve.
- Pxtl 4y ago
  Open-standard social network isn't a worthy problem? Social media solves a real problem, and Mastodon allows users to participate without submitting to the whims of Zuckerberg or Musk. Yes, Mastodon instances can (and do) have opinionated administrators, but Mastodon is unique among social media in that you can move to another instance without abandoning the entire network altogether.
  - DeathArrow 4y ago
    >Open-standard social network isn't a worthy problem? Social media solves a real problem, and Mastodon allows users to participate without submitting to the whims of Zuckerberg or Musk. There were plenty social media not owned by Zuckerberg or Musk networks already >Yes, Mastodon instances can (and do) have opinionated administrators, but Mastodon is unique among social media in that you can move to another instance without abandoning the entire network altogether. You mean like IRC?

493 points by xena 4y ago

Can someone explain what's the benefit of ActivityPub/Fediverse for forums? I mean, if you want descentralization isn't it easier to have different forums in different domains, like we had in the 90s/00s? This feels like a solution looking for a problem. If I was a betting man, I'd bet that this concept will eventually die.

andrewfromx 4y ago

what are the other competitors close to these numbers? I think: https://www.deso.com/ https://www.deso.com/ https://nostr.com/ https://nostr.com/ https://urbit.org/ https://urbit.org/

hprotagonist 4y ago
no way urbit has anything close to 10M users, surely.
xiphias2 4y ago
Nostr is not there in numbers (just hundreds of thousands), but growing super fast, and the clients can't be compared to what they were just a month ago in stability. BTW Nostrica (the first ever Nostr conference) is going on right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NueacYJovA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NueacYJovA
yuppie_scum 4y ago
www.twitter.com
- andrewfromx 4y ago
  very funny, not decentralized.... yet!
rakoo 4y ago
XMPP
- andrewfromx 4y ago
  but c'mon jabberd has been around forever and it's not making waves like Mastodon. Why?
  - codebje 4y ago
    XMPP (née Jabber) isn't a broadcast messaging platform like Twitter or Mastodon, it's a one-on-one or small group instant messaging protocol. It absolutely failed to take off as a broadly decentralised instant messaging service, for a bunch of reasons, but it absolutely succeeded in becoming a widely used instant messaging protocol, at least for a while. Jabber was born in 1998, in a world where there was a handful of centralised desktop instant messaging apps that didn't interoperate at all - ICQ and AIM dominated, but there were plenty of others around too. Most of us ran multiple apps at once, or tried to get clients that could connect to multiple services, but this was complicated by proprietary and frequently changing protocols. A decentralised, federated, and open protocol that let users connect to all other users was a great idea… for users. But it didn't do anything for the behemoths rapidly gaining users in their proprietary centralised systems, and it didn't do anything for ISPs who'd just have to run, and support, another service. Early clients and servers weren't as straightforward as downloading a desktop program from Tucows and running it, and in the space of technically savvy people running a system built on open standards there was already a well established (and heavily fractured!) IRC. XMPP's standardisation in the IETF didn't really help it. While the IETF isn't quite as slow as more traditional standards bodies it's definitely nowhere near as fast as centralised companies with only one client implementation to care about. As the war for eyeballs heated up, instant messaging apps rapidly added features like sharing images (crazy! over _dial-up_?) or emojis (before they were called emojis!) and XMPP simply did not keep up. Nevertheless, XMPP was the basis of iChat (or at least, some versions of it) until iChat was killed in 2011, and the basis of Google Talk until that was killed in 2013. It wasn't too uncommon for corporate internal chat platforms to be using XMPP in one form or another - Cisco still have a product today called Cisco Jabber. But the main thing all of these systems had in common was they absolutely sucked at federating with each other. Theoretically Google Talk supported it, but your corporate system probably didn't. iChat notionally might've but as far as I recall it had so many proprietary extensions and missing standard features that it just wasn't feasible to federate. XMPP did pretty well for a stretch being the underlying protocol for a bunch of proprietary, centralised, and siloed chat systems. In the end mobile phones killed instant messaging platforms. In the 90s most of us didn't have phones, but at the start of the century that rapidly changed and suddenly we all had the same instant messaging platform right in our hands: SMS. Sure, it was never built for heavy use, and mobile companies often charged per message (50c per text in Australia in the early 2000s), but it was _there_ and everyone was on it, and in just a few years desktop instant messaging died off. XMPP never had a chance. Smartphones, of course, re-introduced the hot mess of a dozen competing instant messaging platforms with different parts of your social network on different ones, all centralised, all proprietary.

tus666 4y ago

TBH I thought it would have been a lot more than that.

Method-X 4y ago

Doesn't look like there are many active users.

benatkin 4y ago
Perhaps. Anecdotally, I was 5 times as active on twitter as I am on Mastodon. Now I am not on twitter at all. So I'm more active on Mastodon than on twitter right now, but not super active. If you think that's a victory for twitter, fair enough. It got so much critical mass that it's hard to replicate off of Twitter. But as weeks keep passing by without me going back to twitter, I think that's a win for Mastodon.
- smcl 4y ago
  This is the same as me. I switched from Twitter to Mastodon, use the platform less overall but am happier as a result.
krapp 4y ago
Mastodon isn't designed to incentivize the addiction loops that drive traffic on Twitter and other social media sites. Quality over quantity isn't a bad thing.
jghn 4y ago
I almost never log on to my Mastodon account. When I do, I always say I should do so more as the vast majority of the people I really enjoyed following on Twitter are on there. But the thing is, I just hate the Mastodon UI. It's so clunky. And the lack of things like centralized search are a big issue for me. I dislike the federated nature of it. In short, it's just not to me. Which sucks, as that's where a lot of the content I want to see currently lives. But such is life. Meanwhile, even though my Twitter feed is a shell of what it once was, I wind up there several times a day. And it's not "because of the algorithm", I have been using the algorithm-free feed for years now.
- seba_dos1 4y ago
  > But the thing is, I just hate the Mastodon UI. Which one?

davnicwil 4y ago

Anyone know how a decentralised system like mastadon can meaningfully assess user count? In terms of accounts corresponding to real, distinct people? And has such an analysis been done to produce the numbers this account is reporting?

noarchy 4y ago
>Anyone know how a decentralised system like mastadon can meaningfully assess user count? In terms of accounts corresponding to real, distinct people? Can Twitter even manage that, given the well known issues with bots?
jonas-w 4y ago
https://github.com/gallizoltan/usercount https://github.com/gallizoltan/usercount The bot is open source, it crawls the list at https://instances.social https://instances.social and checks on each instance how many users they have and how many toots (statuses) they have.
numpad0 4y ago
Twitter users are routinely making new sub-accounts to manage persona and relationships, so social media account counts don't correspond to skull counts anyway. Hacked Mastodon instances may report entirely bogus numbers too. But humans are nice, generally speaking... it should work as an indication that there are most likely more than few millions who've signed up at at least one of these instances.
thejohnconway 4y ago
Mastodon instances report their user user stats via the API. I have a bot the polls about 9000 server federated with my own and just adds them all up. It’s always incomplete, however, because non-Mastodon Fediverse applications like Pleroma and Misskey don’t report user stats.
rsynnott 4y ago
I assume it's not a particularly exact science; in particular it would definitely miss completely defederated instances like Gab and Truth Social, but also likely a lot of small federated ones.

rvz 4y ago

10 million 'registered users' not 'daily active users' in 7 years. Even in some of the comments in the post are skeptical about the usage of those registered accounts. In comparison to Twitter (Since Mastodon zealots often pitch it as a 'Twitter alternative' somehow) 7 years after it launched, it had well over 250M+ total users with well over 150M daily actives. [0] Even Nostr has 6M total users in less than 7 years. [1] Either way, total registered number of users tells us nothing about the usage of the network. Yet we have daily actives much less than 1.5M with a large drop in users this year since they don't stick around on Mastodon. [2] It only tells us that there are very loud crickets screaming about migrating to Mastodon which accounted for less than 1% of Twitter's total number of users. (And most of them never stuck around) 7 years is not early days with this. Matrix launched in 2014 and reached 10M in less than 5 years and multiplied by up to 8x to 80M in less than 4 years [3] and it is highly competitive against Signal. There is no excuses for such sluggish user numbers for Mastodon with even less monthly active users. Thus, I think we have given Mastodon enough time and it is clear that it hasn't taken off. Perhaps it is time to stop pretending about users caring about signing up to a over-engineered discord forum promoting pseudo-federation. [0] https://backlinko.com/twitter-users https://backlinko.com/twitter-users [1] https://stats.nostr.band/#total_users https://stats.nostr.band/#total_users [2] https://www.wired.com/story/the-mastodon-bump-is-now-a-slump/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-mastodon-bump-is-now-a-slump... [3] https://news.itsfoss.com/matrix-sixty-million-users/ https://news.itsfoss.com/matrix-sixty-million-users/

gyudin 4y ago
+1 Even monthly non-unique visits continue to decline. 6.9M in November, 3.9M in December, 3.4M in January. And personally every time I’ve tried to use it didn’t work properly as people would have problems with hosting and supporting it for free.
- jeromegv 4y ago
  Where are you getting the non-unique visits data?
tptacek 4y ago
The years Mastodon operated before Musk chased millions of people off Twitter don't count. In the status quo ante of Musk's takeover, Mastodon may never have been viable, but Musk did take over Twitter.

jonas-w 4y ago

It's interesting that there are normally 10.000-40.000 [0] toots per hour and it skyrockets up to 8.000.000 toots per hour in this graph, how is this possible? [0] based on a graph before these huge spikes https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/110030252165962978 https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/11003025216596297...

thejohnconway 4y ago
That bot is notorious for spurious spikes, often making the graphs unreadable. It’s open source, but it’s using an API, not doing its own polling, so it’s hard to dig into what’s going on.

unpopularopp 4y ago

Are the undesirable instances included in this? Edit: seems like they aren’t. So probably there are more users and the 10m have been passed long ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
the_third_wave 4y ago
> the undesirable instances Which would that be? Undesirable by whom? Who gets to decide whether an instance is "undesirable"? I'd think that what is undesirable to one is the bee's knees to the other. Who is to be the arbiter of desirability? In a truly distributed system the answer would be 'nobody - everybody'. Are you talking about instances which are blocked in the source code of Mastodon? Blocked in some of the clients? In that case the answer is 'those who created those blocks'. Are they to be the arbiters then?
- not2b 4y ago
  There are some sites running forks of Mastodon code that intentionally don't federate with other sites. Trump's Truth Social is one. They don't count because they aren't part of the network.
- smsm42 4y ago
  > Which would that be? Probably those sites that "zero toxicity" people declared toxic and mandated to exclude from the fediverse where everyone is welcome. I remember this discussion a while ago and it was one of the main reasons I lost my interest in Mastoson (second being I see no reason to try to fit my thoughts into the format of one yell - I prefer more deliberate discourse) - it felt like they are too much concerned with exclusion rather than inclusion. There are tools to ensure you don't fail to block something that all right thinking people are blocking: https://github.com/Anthchirp/mastodon-defederate https://github.com/Anthchirp/mastodon-defederate
- numpad0 4y ago
  If GP meant 2nd and 3rd largest instances, Pawoo and mstdn.jp - those are on the https://instances.social/instances.json https://instances.social/instances.json that is supposed to be the data source, with 839k/338k users with 70M/65M statuses respectively. Along the mastodon.social with 1M users and 53M statuses, the top 3 account for 2.2M or 1/5th of claimed 10M users... But something seems off. "users" key on that .json only adds up to 7816421, not 10M. There has to be either a data error, or couple elephants in the room totaling at 2.2M, or the long tail that isn't loading for me.

dom96 4y ago

Shameless plug: I created a browser extension to help transition to Mastodon[0]. If you don't yet feel like you can leave twitter.com, but want to explore alternatives it's a great way to get started. Essentially it injects Mastodon posts into your Twitter timeline, so you can retain your existing Twitter following while getting exposed to Mastodon. [0] - https://chirper.picheta.me https://chirper.picheta.me

Hamuko 4y ago
That sounds kinda backwards. If I'm staying on Twitter, what's the value-add from having Mastodon posts there? I've witnessed very few individuals drop Twitter completely in favour of Mastodon.
- dom96 4y ago
  The value add is that you can be a part of Mastodon without having to learn how to use the Mastodon UX. Just one way to increase Mastodon usage for those that like Twitter UX and don't want to have to remember to visit Twitter and Mastodon.

nforgerit 4y ago

After about 6 months hosting my own little private Mastodon instance, I can say the following things: (1) Whoever cares about that but the atmosphere is nice, cozy, exciting and creative. Zero toxicity and probably several magnitudes more meaningful conversations with people from all around the world. This apparently comes from the kinds of people I could find and connect with. (2) Hosting is relatively easy. I think all kinds of organizations (e.g. sports clubs, media companies, private companies, schools, political parties, gov't agencies, etc.) should give it a shot hosting their own instances to take control of their social media identity. They don't necessarily need to open registrations for everyone and start moderating "the masses". I only let few hand-picked people on my instance that I happen to know IRL and still have a happy life. (3) I once saw a post from a German IT mag (heise, I think from November 2022) that claimed that they have more traffic through Mastodon than through any other Social Media thingy. Surely, their audience was a good fit but I think it's a matter of critical mass when more less-nerdy people would join the Fediverse. In summary, I deleted my Twitter account ~2 months ago and don't regret it. Some things are a bit annoying (mostly bugs, finding and connecting with other people, not much interaction with my posts [maybe it's because my posts are sh*t]) but all in all it's a great resource for inspiration and digital interaction with other people.

haunter 4y ago
> Zero toxicity ymmv. The mastodon.lol (which was a safe space instance) drama over Hogwarts Legacy [0] was a very good reminder that the platform doesn’t matter, its the people. 0, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195
- benatkin 4y ago
  > the platform doesn’t matter, its the people. Neither mattered in that case. It was just a conundrum. Something a lot of people wanted to boycott had a AAA game built for it. I assume you're coming on the side of Nathan, but can't you see why people were going to have a strong reaction about posts about the game surfacing in the feed? It was a wedge issue. I'm not on either side, except I am against those who actually threw those insults at Nathan, which I'm pretty sure were a tiny % of the people who disagreed with him. I think if they had merely expressed frustration about the situation but not gone off the handle the same thing could have happened, albeit more slowly.

EamonnMR 4y ago

Being able to follow just hashtags and users and never getting recommended garbage is very nice. I mostly just use Twitter to follow Dril now.

jeroenhd 4y ago
I'm sure Twitter will kill them one of these days, but services like https://bird.makeup/users/Dril/remote_follow https://bird.makeup/users/Dril/remote_follow exist, which allow you to follow Twitter users on Mastodon. This has the downside of missing interactivity and incomplete reaction chains, but as someone who's usually not interested in either it's been good enough for me to remove Twitter from my pinned tabs.
jeffbee 4y ago
In what way would that be different from the Twitter "Following" feed?
- jeromegv 4y ago
  Lots of spam on twitter nowadays, so following a hashtag might lead to a lot of garbage. And the other difference obviously is ads, you read 5 tweets and get an ad in the following feed.

jackvalentine 4y ago

I have been using https://streetpass.social/ https://streetpass.social/ to find more mastodon users - it uses the ‘verified domains’ thing in mastodon in reverse - you go to a website and if it is verifying a mastodon profile it gives you a link. I’ve been very surprised how many people and organisations are on the fediverse.

starkparker 4y ago

10 million accounts != 10 million users

kornhole 4y ago
Right. I have three accounts myself: The first is personal with my real name that I generally post to followers only who are people I know. The second is a professional focused identity for business topics. The final is a pseudonymous account for political stuff I don't want showing up on a deep background search from employers or intelligence agencies. It is kind of a replacement for Zuckbook, Lockedin, and Twitter accounts.

jacooper 4y ago

Honestly I really tried to use the fediverse, but its not good enough. Search is hot garbage, can't find anything useful, or what people are actually talking about, not that Twitters search is great by any measure. Missing content when visiting external content, cuz why would anyone ever want to see or search old content. Also most clients I have seen show replies in a really stupid way, you have to actively click to see what the person is replying to, its not visible in the timeline. Outside of the English speaking indie-privacy-tech bubble (and germans seem to be very active on it too) its a ghost land. In general I have been spending more time on hacker news and youtube than Twitter and fediverse, they aren't like pre-elon twitter.

MisterSandman 4y ago
Is search really that big of a deal? > Outside of the English speaking indie-privacy-tech bubble (and germans seem to be very active on it too) its a ghost land. "Outside of the super-active communities using Mastodon everyday, it is a ghostland."
- illiarian 4y ago
  > Is search really that big of a deal? Yes. From finding things to searching archives etc. Tim Bray has a good post on the topic: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/12/30/Mastodon-Privacy-and-Search https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/12/30/Mastodon-... (you can skip to the very last section if you don't want to read it all)
- jacooper 4y ago
  These communities are active if not more active on Twitter. One of the things that made Twitter good is that every niche uses it.
- Hamuko 4y ago
  >Is search really that big of a deal? I used Twitter search constantly.
- crazygringo 4y ago

whywhywhydude 4y ago

I wish they changed the name to something better. Would probably increase adoption greatly if they can come up with a name that doesn’t sound like a porn site specializing in bondage.

iz_zi 4y ago
It’s all good if you need something more vanilla there is discord.
spicyusername 4y ago
How does "Mastodon" evoke that for you!?
- malwrar 4y ago
  Mastodon looks like “master-dom” or “masto(urba…) dom” or similar. I also have experience with people giving a weird eye when I mention the name, it’s not pen island or anything but it’s close enough to have caused nonzero issues.
  - LBJsPNS 4y ago
    If people are giving you a weird eye over the name Mastodon, I would say it has much more to do with them than with the nane.
smsm42 4y ago
TIL a large prehistoric elephant is somehow closely associated with bondage porn. Will the wonders never cease.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  A "large prehistoric elephant" isn't really a good name for a social platform either.
xigoi 4y ago
The fact that you see the name this way says more about you.

cogwheels 4y ago

That ten million figure includes the many of us who created an account on some instance, had a browse around for a few minutes, realised it was a boring wasteland of a service, and never logged on again. Let's see the data for active users, not just registrations.

thejohnconway 4y ago
Active users is probably around 1.6-2m for Mastodon, and maybe another million on top of that for Mastodon-compatible Fediverse software like Pleroma and Misskey (they don’t report active users).

6ak74rfy 4y ago

If you are considering self-hosting your instance, I’ll recommend Go To Social. It is still alpha quality software but all the basic functions work fine. But it’s a much lighter alternative to Mastodon.

konart 4y ago
From their blog (https://gts.superseriousbusiness.org/@gotosocial/statuses/01GS15VTW657H4XGB1BKFRTEDZ https://gts.superseriousbusiness.org/@gotosocial/statuses/01...): >We do not work with transphobes/fascists/racists. If you open an issue or PR on our git repo and we see you are one of those things, or hang out with people like that, we will kick you out of our space. We have no patience for bigotry, and we see no reason whatsoever to tolerate having it anywhere near us. Fuck terfs and fuck nazis. >we are a strictly antifascist organization. we have zero tolerance for fascism or anything that enables or allows it. (yes that includes capitalism) I'd honestly rather stay away from people who claim they are "antifascist organization" but at the same time have zero understanding what does "nazism" or "fascism" actually means. Nor do they have any kind of FAQ on how they are going to determine who is what and how should I know if somebody I follow on fediverse or github is one of those things.
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  Imma be honest with you it has never occurred to me that I would legitimately be considered a transphobe, racist, fascist, or nazi. And if someone sincerely was informing me I was doing this to the point where they could no longer tolerate my presence I would take some serious time to introspect what I did and potentially reach out to a neutral third party like a therapist to figure out if I have to do some work on myself. Basically I wouldn’t worry about a stance like that, because either it will never apply to me or if it does, I can take it as a fairly low-stakes learning opportunity! (It’s not like I’m losing my job, getting divorced, etc. from this!) (I would consider it a similar hardline stance to, idk, “we do not work with human traffickers, if we think you’re pro human trafficking we’ll avoid you” or “we do not work with serial killers, if we think you’re pro serial killer we’ll avoid you”. Like I know I’m neither of those things, and if people think I am, holy shit!! I need to fix that asap!!)

stevebmark 4y ago

This is sad to see. Mastodon is already dead. It's fundamentally impossible for it to catch on with a wider audience. Right now the only platform worse than Twitter is Mastodon. Whatever the Twitter replacement is, we haven't found it yet.

glass3 4y ago
Where is the fundamental limit? It's a protocol. Somebody could create an instance that does everything right for mass adoption.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  Focusing on the "protocol" is the limit. Nobody among regular people cares about the protocol, they care about a social media experience on-par or better than what they're currently using. If they have to figure out this whole technobabble mess that is the "fediverse" it becomes a non-starter.
  - glass3 4y ago
    Yes. That would be doing it wrong for mass adoption. Doing it right means that users don't have to care about the protocol. But there still has to be infrastructure. Instead of reinventing the wheel, a new social network could be built on the Mastodon foundation. There would already be users and there would be an exit strategy for power users if the new network fails. Right now, it's not worth investing time in a new network because the social graph doesn't survive the end of the network. With Mastodon, it would be easy to migrate to a new service.
krapp 4y ago
I agree. Mastodon is dead. You definitely shouldn't bother. In fact, everyone here complaining about how the platform won't put up with their edgy anti-woke shenanigans should just stay away. You're all too smart and cool for such a lame place.
- LBJsPNS 4y ago

textread 4y ago

Putting this into context:- Twitter currently has ~400M users, 50% of them DAUs [1] [1] https://backlinko.com/twitter-users https://backlinko.com/twitter-users I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. ~ Nelson Mandela

input_sh 4y ago
Except it's not currently, it's from over a year ago ("Updated Jan. 05, 2022"). Back when Twitter still had an obligation to share DAUs because it was a public company. Nobody outside Twitter knows the current amount of DAUs. Whichever number you find post Q3 last year is a pure guess.
phplovesong 4y ago
Like FB there is most likely millions and millions of bot accounts. When in doubt, go with the 80%/20% rule.

phplovesong 4y ago

I applied for mastodon, but never got an confirmation. I think the tech has some serious bugs, and afaict needs polish. When users cant sign up theres red flags going on.

klntsky 4y ago
Just call their 24/7 support over the phone line.
dym_sh 4y ago
> I applied for mastodon which server? there are multiple server-side platforms too, incl. some forks, so if mastodon.social is not for you – look around for better lighter alternatives (as well for self-hosting) start around here: https://github.com/emilebosch/awesome-fediverse#applications https://github.com/emilebosch/awesome-fediverse#applications
- phplovesong 4y ago
  Literally one of the first ones i found in mastodon.org. Clicked "tech" servers, then browsed until i found fosstodon.org, which seemed like the best match for my own preferences. So signed up, and still nothing. This was months ago, so i have pretty much given up on the entire thing.
  - dym_sh 4y ago
    if all you wanted to do is look around, it is understandable why giving up was this easy. honestly, if github and HN suffice for all your social needs, you probably dont need anything else. microblogging is not for everyone. but for others, since twitter is just no longer viable, people have been migrating to something that can't be just bought out by yet another rich asshole. plus privacy, extended control over your own data, and all that other nerd shit no one cares about.
    - phplovesong 4y ago
      I really dont care that much. To be honest i just wanted to "try it out", and also i cant stand twitter, its just such a echo chamber, and is full of pro russia trolls and trumpists, so i gave that up too. Im sure the trolls will migrate to mastodon too, sooner or later.

lazzlazzlazz 4y ago

Individual Mastodon instances have already begun exhibiting insane behavior, and relying on someone else's fiefdom isn't for me. Social media should give full control to the user on top of a credibly neutral layer.

berkes 4y ago
> Social media should give full control to the user Are you implying this isn't possible with Mastodon/ActivityPub?
- KoftaBob 4y ago
  It's possible if users host their own Mastodon instance, which for the vast majority of users is way too much of a hassle to do. This is one of the reasons I think the nostr protocol is a better way of building a decentralized + censorship resistant social network. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#the-problem-with-mastodon-and-similar-programs https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#the-problem-with-mas...
  - berkes 4y ago
    Activitypub > Mastodon. While it currently indeed is rather impractical and even unattainable to run your own instance, it's by no means impossible. The protocol has no opinion on it¹. ActivityPub is more complex than nostr (I've built software for both) but not fundamentally different. Neither nostr nor activityPub have fundamental properties that make it possible or impossible to be fully P2P or fully centralized. Nostr can easily become centralized. AP too. But ActivityPub can operate in a P2P nature - where every user == a server just as well as nostr can. Practically, Mastodon is the default for AP, and thus dictates the use and shape. But I run my own gotosocial AP server, which is both simple, lean and clean. So already it's practically possible to run an AP server on tiny hardware with hardly any maintenance overhead. ¹EDIT: AP just describes an "inbox/outbox" with a PUB-SUB mechanism over HTTP. HTTP requires some discovery (dns), but that does not require fixed servers/domains. One could theoretically have an "inbox" (http-endpoint) on their mobile phone, bypassing the need for a server alltogether. Nostr is much simpler, it has that going for it, certainly! But when people say that nostr is "p2p" and AP isn't, that only describes the current state, not their fundamentals.

6510 4y ago

Thanks Elon, you've single-handedly made the internet a better place.

jokoon 4y ago

Who moderates this when content is reported? Can mastodon detect porn automatically and hide it? Anybody can build a social network today, the most difficult task is and always will be moderation.

red_trumpet 4y ago
Every instance has its own moderation, there is no central moderation. Porn is not detected automatically, but most instances require you to put it behind a content warning. Then it will not be shown automatically, you have to click to view it.
mxuribe 4y ago
If you run your own instance of an activityPub server - e.g. mastodon, gotosocial, pixelfed, etc. - for, let's say, yourself or your family, then you will have vastly more capabilities to moderate content (way easier and more reliable than relying on others to do so). If your next question is: why do i have to moderate the content myself? ...Then, your expectations are not aligned with (and/or you misunderstand) the greater fediverse's design. I think the kids would say: "You're holding/using it wrong." ;-)

app4soft 4y ago

> Mastodon hit 10M users Not a users, but accounts. 45% of 20 people that took part in my poll[0] has 2..4 accounts on various Mastodon servers (I has 3 accounts). [0] https://fosstodon.org/@app4soft/109885069770027479 https://fosstodon.org/@app4soft/109885069770027479

toomim 4y ago
And many accounts are not active. I would hazard a guess that of these 10M accounts, less than 1M are active users--making the submission headline very misleading indeed.
- rchaud 4y ago
  It's misleading if you think of it as an investor filing. Ooh, how are they calculating revenue per user?? Directionally, it's good news. More self-selecting into using Mastodon, hopefully for non-nefarious purposes (advertising, influencing, blowhard-ing), will lead to more conversations.
bombcar 4y ago
This is the proper way to deal with almost ANY social media, unless it is literally one-purpose like HN; you should have various accounts for your various persona and they shouldn't cross.

tinyhouse 4y ago

It had an opportunity to take over Twitter but it's just not ready for main stream. The user experience is too confusing and too much for the average user.

tiborsaas 4y ago

Any statistics on the demographics?

tonystubblebine 4y ago

Regardless of this horse race coverage, I’ve been having a really good time on Mastodon. It’s much less toxic than Twitter and it’s easy to get into interesting discussions with smart people.

kertoip_1 4y ago
If you know who to follow. It's still much to be done with account recommendations

baxuz 4y ago

Can someone please explain how Mastodon is anything else except Reddit with more hoops to jump through? You have users, subreddits (servers), and mods. Except everything is federated, so you also have the overhead of choosing your server or making a ton of alt accounts. Flashback to old MMO times.

d1sxeyes 4y ago
By the same token, you could say 'how is Hacker News any different to Reddit except there are no subreddits?' You say you have the 'overhead of choosing your server', but then you have a similar overhead with every post on Reddit—choosing which subreddit to post it on. You absolutely don't have to make a ton of alt accounts, that's sort of the point of being federated. You create your account on a server of your choosing (even one you own/manage), and then you can follow anyone on any server (even those not using Mastodon, provided they're using an ActivityPub compatible server, such as Pixelfed which is similar to Instagram). Mastodon encourages short form microblogging with individuals who know each other interacting on all sorts of different topics. Reddit encourages link sharing or longer form posts with communities of like-minded pseudonymous users. Both platforms can be used for both use cases though.
jeromegv 4y ago
Reddit is thread based. This is more like a feed. I see it more like a decentralized twitter than a reddit with hoops.
aktenlage 4y ago
There are no up and downvotes, so it's purely chronological. There are Hashtags. User mentions are more common.
- Pxtl 4y ago
  Likes/favrs are basically upvotes, really. The like count isn't displayed up front but it's there.
Pxtl 4y ago
It's very different. Servers are not subreddits -- your account lives on a single server, for example. In fact, the fact that servers are both the auth/identity system and topic-based moderation is imho one of the biggest design weaknesses of mastodon. Anyhow, it's more "federated Twitter" than anything else. Particularly early twitter before the quote-tweets, algorithmic feed, and other modern features.

pictur 4y ago

is mastodon content indexed somewhere? i.e. is it possible to do a general search and find shared stuff? i've never used it, just asking because I'm curious.

jeromegv 4y ago
It's on the web for the most part, indexed by Google. ex: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amastodon.social+hacker+news&client=safari&rls=en&ei=j18YZNqKAYC5qtsPitGauAQ&ved=0ahUKEwiajvDAzur9AhWAnGoFHYqoBkcQ4dUDCA8&uact=5&oq=site%3Amastodon.social+hacker+news&gs_lcp=Cgxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAQA0oECEEYAVDbBljxImDFI2gBcAB4AIABQIgBiwWSAQIxMpgBAKABAcABAQ&sclient=gws-wiz-serp https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amastodon.social+hacke... The search within the app is mostly not working and crap, unless you use hashtags (and the toots were created with hashtags)

cbeach 4y ago

I'm probably listed among those "10M users" I checked out Mastodon for an hour or so, saw less engagement than Twitter, more of an echo chamber, and a generally inferior user experience. Now I don't actively use it. It's sad in some ways, because I think centralised Big Tech (as a general concept) is undesirable. But to break the network effect, alternatives have to be much better. Also I'm concerned about Mastodon shared, curated blocklists. People who express unconventional/inconvenient viewpoints will not be safe on a decentralised network that has anti-free-speech, groupthink authoritarian mechanisms. (Yes, I know I wouldn't be forced to use a shared blocklist on my own Mastodon instance - but the problem is that my instance would be vulnerable to the whims of those who curate shared blocklists).

adithyassekhar 4y ago

Yes the echo chamber social media.

jrm4 4y ago

For what it's worth, my Mastodon experience. Broadly, I think the best use of Mastodon IS to be a Twitter competitor; a noisy town square. What I have seen is -- the disagreeable people on Twitter want to publically fight. They want to push their bad ideas and have everyone listen to them, and thus are willing to get into it. The disagreeable people on Mastodon want to silence others. They're more block happy and don't want to be questioned at all. That's why, presently, I prefer the disagreeable people over at Twitter; they're actually using the platform better (and you can possibly change their minds) I do hope this changes.

troad 4y ago
Mastodon, like Twitter, is full of people saying extreme things for attention, but it differs from Twitter in that there's no one to make fun of those people, because that would be 'negativity'. For that reason, I tend to find Mastodon feeds absolutely insufferable.
rchaud 4y ago
Mastodon is not a commercial entity, it doesn't have to compete with Twitter any more than my alumni.university email has to compete with Gmail. Mastodon offers a simple solution to stay out of the text wars, one that Twitter wouldn't dare offer: "turn off reblogs". Half the people I follow retweet/boost things I find irrelevant (personally). I can turn that off on Mastodon to reduce the noise. I can't on Twitter because then I might spend less time on the app, robbing them on precious ad revenue.
- detaro 4y ago
  Twitter has that feature.
- jrm4 4y ago
  The problem is, it's not a very good "solution" because reblogs was also a useful feature in spreading certain kinds of information. In my opinion, Twitter was (and is) instrumental in effectively highlighting certain kinds of important, unrecognized, "news," e.g. police brutality. I'm glad Mastodon folk are considering effective ways to reintroduce it.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

TRiG_Ireland 4y ago

I'm on Mastodon, but I find the experience extremely frustrating. The UI has all the annoyances of Twitter's (which I also dislike), and more besides. It's a fun enough place to mess around and post throwaway jokes, but using it for anything serious would be a mistake: federation means that often only some of the posts in a given thread make it to your server, so often bits of a conversation are silently missing. This can lead to all kinds of miscommunication, misunderstanding, unintentional offence, and talking at cross purposes. It is, to my mind, a massive design flaw. (The fact that most servers have a fairly low character limit for posts, but allow chaining posts together to make threads is another problem, inherited from Twitter. It's harder to write; it's harder to read. It's harder to read even if all the posts in a chain federate to your server, which they may not. Individual posts in the middle of a chain may surface on the timeline out of context and make no sense. The entire structure is ridiculous, irritating, and pointlessly difficult to use.)

swayvil 4y ago
The Mastodon/Twitter format lends itself to a bite-sized form of conversation. Consumed and replied to in a moment. It optimizes for something I'm sure. Maybe "conversation volume" It's popular.
rchaud 4y ago
I used a FOSS android app called Tusky and for the most part I can't tell the difference between that and Twitter.
- TRiG_Ireland 4y ago
  I asked a Mastodon howto question, and got an answer almost immediately. A week later, someone else helpfully provided the same answer, because the previous answer had not federated to his server. It's not a matter of which app you use: conversations will silently be missing bits.

DeathArrow 4y ago

Those 10M users are in fact 10M accounts. Given that some people have multiple accounts, given that some accounts are for bots, given that some people opened accounts just to test it and never to be seen again, real active users might be a lot less than 10M.

DeathArrow 4y ago

I don't get what problem Mastodon is trying to solve.

Pxtl 4y ago
Open-standard social network isn't a worthy problem? Social media solves a real problem, and Mastodon allows users to participate without submitting to the whims of Zuckerberg or Musk. Yes, Mastodon instances can (and do) have opinionated administrators, but Mastodon is unique among social media in that you can move to another instance without abandoning the entire network altogether.
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  >Open-standard social network isn't a worthy problem? Social media solves a real problem, and Mastodon allows users to participate without submitting to the whims of Zuckerberg or Musk. There were plenty social media not owned by Zuckerberg or Musk networks already >Yes, Mastodon instances can (and do) have opinionated administrators, but Mastodon is unique among social media in that you can move to another instance without abandoning the entire network altogether. You mean like IRC?