Personally, I just don't enjoy that Twitter-like format. I never used Twitter so I find it... Awkward? To me its kinda like a platformer with bad controls, everything else about the game might be great but if it doesnt feel satisfying to play, I'll skip.

I still have my account and Megalodon on my phone but I just can't get into it.

It's not dead but it has one big and massive issue that prevents mass adoption - discovery. If I can't just write the name of my friends in search and find them no matter where they made their account - for an ordinary user, or one that comes from centralized services, this seems extremely alien and hostile.

And in the end, if you can't find your friends, you want to interact with, what is the point of using the service?

Luckily, Mastodon is working on a discorvery protocol that should offer a way to find people across the board, which will hopefully make the Fediverse "appear" centralized to the average Joe while maintaining all the benefits of decentralization to the advanced users.

I personally didn't like mastodon's UI style, I found it tedious to use and more complicated then needed.

There's no real similar product(at least out of what I've used) so nothing to run muscle memory on, and it deep dived into federation to the point it was confusing too confusing to figure out

@thenexusofprivacy So, I've just kinda got a stream of random tidbits here that'll hopefully sorta surmise my thoughts.

The good:

First off, it's shrunk but it's by no means dead. Things grow and shrink and grow again, if it was a straight line with no variation I'd assume it was fake.

Also, Mastodon is not all of activity pub. Threads has brought a lot if people onto the protocol, and while it's still in development it seems to be intended to work interoperably and the devs said they plan to let people migrate out and take their following/followers with them. I expect this to really supercharge the ecosystem.

The indifferent:

This isn't 2020 anymore, and there's more protocols out there. Nostr, in my opinion, is leagues better in the decentralization and user options/customizations department. AT (Bluesky) is leagues better in the end user was of use department. Both of those protocols are also much, much, lighter to host.

Activity pub also has it's advantages of course. Being the oldest and also being great for communities are two quite big ones.

Some people have chosen to either leave Activity Pub for those protocols, or joined the decentralized ecosystem directly into one of the other two. It's indifferent, though, because it's a decentralized ecosystem. All three can chat with each other, so Mastodon & Activity Pub may have shrunk - but the amount of people you can communicate with on them has risen exponentially thanks to bridges.

The ugly:

Federation is a mess. You can have a dozen friends on Activity Pub, a dozen on other protocols connected via bridges or threads and find you can only talk to two or three. That's a problem; most would give up before understanding why, and many more would likely figure out why and the decide it's not worth their time working around. After the Bluesky wave I've heard Mastodon be called some variation of "bickering fiefs" a couple dozen times.

There's also some toxicity within the space. Most people I've interacted with have been great, but it still rears it's head now and then. You can get nearly bullied off the platform if you suggest people be nice to Windows users. It was kinda funny to see that blog post shortly after I jokingly said "you guys would probably put a hit out on me if I said I was using Windows" in a similar thread. In a similar vein, while accessibility is great, I'd bet more people have left the protocol after being yelled at for not using alt text then there are users who rely on alt text.

My predictions:

I'd bet that all three protocols grow a lot in the future and that more platforms start integrating one or more of the three big protocols. It's a cheat code for new platforms to automatically have a bunch of content, and it's free platform software already built. Federation issues and fediverse specific toxicity issues will potentially be eternal septembered away. Most people won't care what OS you use and will want to be able to talk to their friends as apposed to having current federation. There might be a small splinter group of the older crowd using opt-in federation, but most of the ecosystem will change if it grows.

I'd also bet the three big protocols will continue to get closer. All three can already communicate, and heck, I, as an incompitant programmer, made a quick script that lets any Nostr client communicate with Mastodon &/or Bluesky. Throw some compitant devs at it and soon enough you probably won't even be able to tell at first glance what protocol the other person you're communicating with is on. Bluesky and Nostr in the mix bring Mastodon's ~800k monthly active users to like ~15 million. A more connected ecosystem make things better for everyone.

I agree with top comment.

I'm Indonesian. Most of trending fediverse are Western related topics which It's not relevant to me.

There's one time when I randomly post about my country politics, and people on Mastodon just assume or comment using Western mindset.

Other than this Lemmy account, I mostly stick with hobby-related fediverse that mostly East Asian and Southeast Asian people.

Also, Indonesian is currently the highest user on Twitter, recently bypassed Brazil. People still use it as our local feed is... well localized. No Western-related discussion and much more comfy.

I made a Mastodon account during that blitz in '22. Yes, content wasn't there yet, but honestly, it was the interface for me. It's UI didn't feel simplistic enough to me as someone just getting started with it.

Lemmy may have faced a similar fate for me if it weren't for the smooth interface of Sync to be honest. I know many on here are leaps and bounds beyond my tech proficiency, but so many folks are still in the stone ages writing their passwords on post-it notes etc so to think that they'd adopt something like Mastodon over Twitter or Lemmy over Reddit seems like the bigger counterparts will always win just on sign-up flow and instant gratification.

I have a Mastodon account and now on my fourth, fifth instance. I instance hop a lot, which helped me find my people.

I dont agree with a huge chunk of what was said in the post. But I understand where the white people in Bali reference comes from. I am an Asian woman in tech and took me awhile to find people that I can actually connect with. What I like about Mastodon is the fact that I can find niche topics that I wont see in other social media. Also, want to flag that I no longer have accounts in proprietary social media since 2017 which probably helped my drive to find an online community.

In saying so, I have faced some crazy level of stalking (one person only so I guess its isolated?) to the point that this person messaged me on Linkedin and emailed me to tell me I was being impersonated on Mastodon. Because he didnt believe that I am myself??? He went on saying, Hi Miss, I saw youre being impersonated blah blah.

But I also want to mention that I have met so many amazing people through Mastodon.

Its a weird space, but I am weird so I guess I belong there. Loo

I kinda want to give it another try. There was once a blogpost posted here (i think) about basically "how to have fun on mastodon", something like that, but i can not find it anymore. Anybody remember this and got a link?

I kind of don’t want it to succeed to the level of Twitter. All the people I like on Mastodon are there now and the trolls and chuds are mostly staying away because they don’t get the attention of millions of eyeballs.

Mastodon is pretty different to its competitors. It looks similar to Twitter / Bluesky, but the way the social network functions is completely different.

It's designed to be anti-infuencer... One of the things I hate about most social media platforms is a few people get all the attention. There are a few reasons for this, but it's not really based on merit.

I think a lot of people joined Mastodon wanting a Twitter clone. It's obviously not and Bluesky is, so people moved there. The approach Mastodon takes is far from perfect, and may not work out in the long run. But it seems like it's worth at least trying something different.

Mastodon is not struggling.

1. Mastodon is not a single entity, if mastodon.art dies tomorrow I would just create a new Mastodon profile on another instance.
2. Yeah, Mastodon use surged in 2022 and 2023, and yeah most users didn't stay around, but compared to the numbers before 2022, Mastodon has s big bump of new users.

Looking at two surges of new users seeing the vast majority not stick around and missing that a sizable chunk still stayed is missing the point.

This article would never have been written if the user increase didn't have temporary surges, that result would be the same number of users, but less brand recognition.

Mastodon is also not driven by the same kind of metrics as a centralized system, plenty of people can just run their own instance just for the fun of it, they don't need constant growth.

So calm down, and take it slow.

Don't sell Mastodon short.

I have a mastodon account, I still check it occasionally and I've tried making it work a year ago, being active on it and following either people or hashtags. I also tried other networks like bsky and cara, or mastodon through kbin integration. None of them really worked out.

I didn't have an issue with the technical side as much as with the community and its mentality. They all have this persecution complex where everyone is out to get them and destroy their way of living. They simultaneously claim it's better and more morally superior than twitter while also responding to any questions or feedback with "if you don't like it GTFO". Most of the posts I've seen on mastodon seemed masturbatory and/or talking about other social networks and why are they bad than why is mastodon actually good. In many ways it was more toxic and negative than my carefully curated twitter feed. There's also as much doom and gloom as on twitter, if not more, when it comes to politics (or at least, it's harder to hide it).

The content in general was bad and boring but I don't know if this is because of the type of people that are on it or just because the lack of algorithm means I will see any random person's ramblings next to the biggest breaking news that I'm actually interested in. There is a lack of innovation in this area and it makes discoverability and content curation terrible, I don't need an algorithm to read my mind but at the very least I wish it could separate trash from actual popular topics.

I found some interesting niches when it comes to FOSS developers and tech but I found next to no actual game devs, artists or content creators on it and even the usual "copy content from twitter" bots were unreliable and uncommon.

TL;DR Mastodon seems very very niche and is not currently viable as a general replacement for other social networks, and IMHO due to the community culture there it's never going to grow into anything else either.

While I agree with the article and a lot of comments, I am still active on my Mastodon account and I am enjoying it more than ever.

Disclaimer: I'm a white male westerner working in IT. 😉

A friend of mine works in linguistics and education. He was an avid Twitter user and has since migrated to Bluesky and Mastodon. He says, Mastodon is quite complex and clunky but on Bluesky there's not much happening in his bubble.

For me, the quality of the conversation and the regional character of my local instance is a big plus on Madison. On Lemmy, I read a lot on international and tech topics, but on Mastodon, the conversation is related more to my countries politics and my region.

So, maybe they lost a lot of users. But the 14% that stayed are a good start for quite a vivid community.

If anyone has questions on how to get something out of Mastodon, ask away or follow me here: mateng@nrw.social.

i wish Lemmy would embrace Mastodon and make it easy for Lemmy users to join that network

Because Threads and BlueSky form effective competition with Twitter.

Also, short form content with just a few sentences per post sucks. It's become obvious. That Twitter was mostly algorithm hype and FOMO.

Mastodon tries to be healthier but I'm not convinced that microblogs in general are that useful, especially to a techie audience who knows RSS and other publishing formats.

i have a mastodon account but it’s completely useless for me.

the only thing i use twitter for is to follow updates and news from professional journalists and artists who are not on mastodon and likely will never be. if your job depends on twitter, switching to mastodon is not going to happen.

if i want to engage with random average people, i come here to lemmy.

Definently had the feeling of walking into a gay bar and not knowing anyone, like the article says.

I thought it was pretty cool personally because I never interact with gay people (afaik) in real life. And we have computer tech as a common interest, that's why we are on mastadon... But for people who are not into tech, I guess it's not so much to talk about maybe.

I tried to replace Twitter by Mastodon but, in the end, I just left Twitter and don’t use Mastodon at all. The main reason I think is because the « onboarding » is painful. I never succeeded to find interesting people to follow. I faced many ghost accounts from people posting once a month or stopped a few years ago.

If you don’t find people by yourself, no one is going to see your posts and so, you won’t be able to find new people to follow by posting.

I don’t like what Twitter became, but the base principle of the algorithm (before it became X with the paid subscriptions) was working great for me. I was constantly adding new people to the mix, and removing inactive ones every month.

If I struggled this much with Mastodon, I am not surprised many people create an account and leave a few days / weeks later.

Drag simply thinks microblogging is boring. Nobody has anything interesting to say and nobody smelled drag's toots.

Let's see:

Network effect hits Mastodon specially hard as it competes not just with Twitter, but also Threads and Bluesky. In those situations, a smaller userbase means that people will outright ignore you as an option.

The way that federation was implemented; as linearchaos mentioned in another thread, if you settle in a smaller instance (the "right" thing to do), you won't get "good collections of off node traffic". So it creates a situation where, if you know how federation works you'll avoid big instances, and worsen your own experience; and if you don't, well, Mastodon's big selling point goes down the drain.

Federation itself introduces a complexity cost. That's unavoidable and the benefits of federation outweigh the cost by far; however, the cost is concrete while the bigger benefit is far more abstract.

Branding issues. Other users already mentioned it, but you don't sell a novel tech named after an extinct animal.

And this is just conjecture from my part, but I think that microblogging is becoming less popular than it used to be; people who like short content would rather go watch a TikTok video, and people who want well-thought content already would rather read a "proper" blog instead.

On a lighter side: the very fact that we're using the ActivityPub now helps Mastodon, even if we're in different platforms (like Lemmy, MBin, PieFed, SubLinks). Due to how federation works, you're bound to see someone in Mastodon sharing content with those forums and vice versa; it could be a bit less clunky but it's still more content for both sides.

On the text: I think that the author reached the right conclusion through the wrong reasoning. The activity peaks don't matter that much, when there's a huge influx of users you're bound to see some leaving five minutes later. The reason why Mastodon is struggling is this:

Source of the data.

See those slopes down? They show that the stable userbase is shrinking. Even users engaged enough with the platform are slowly leaving, but newbies who could fill their place aren't popping up.

Mastodon is 10 years younger and has 0.24% of Twitter’s user-base.

They’re doing great!

because its name is Mastodon, something that when people google it pulls up a band.

Also because it's trying to be a hot fresh new thing but it's literally named after an animal that's extinct.

If it had a catchier and more unique name it probably would have caught on more.

I never liked the microblog format so while I've had acouple masto accounts since 2016 I never used it. But i also never used twitter.

I think because when it comes to Instagram or Twitter type social media more people probably use it only to follow accounts and have no interest in being involved in it. So closer to treating it like a rss reader than something like lemmy or reddit. And conversation feed sucks in general.

I use squawker for Twitter. Can't comment, like, sub, or whatever and account follows are just local feeds like Stealth for Reddit or NewPipe or Freetube. And that's all I need from it.

Honestly my biggest issue is getting randomly banned from trans spaces for expressing my own lived experience with surgery and how I view my own body and gender. They're so "inclusive" that they start excluding people that don't use their very specific language or share their beliefs exactly. They keep kicking people out then wondering where all the people went!

There's just not many people on there. And I already never used Twitter except to read in-time updates from people and companies, so naturally with many of them being on Threads or Bluesky, that's where I'd go to get that information.

I mean it's just normal to have a "social" part to social media, no?

Bluesky, using ATProto, which as near as I can tell is not used by anyone else, is not part of the fediverse as a result. Since both ActivityPub, and ATProto, and for that matter also Zot, are all open sourced protocols, it is my hope someone will build bridge software that incorporates and provides interoperability between both. Hubzilla would seem an ideal place for that to happen since that is already it's role, to bridge multiple protocols.

Mastodon has a larger percentage of the fediverse audience than any other agent, so not sure how you can equate that to struggling to survive. It is somewhat polluted with former Twatter left wing retards but that is just because it's resemblance to Twatter lead to it's adoption by a lot of former twatter twits when Musk took Twatter over.