Eight years on, Mastodon stubbornly survives

some weird wannabe social network with no large corporation behind it and no VC money in the bank cannot work, should not work, will not work.
techbros can’t even imagine something working without capitalism, they truly have no imagination… no wonder they made genAI
- I really hope you are right. I currently predict some issues with the scalability of the fediverse, maybe due to ignorance. If the majority of people switch their social media to the fediverse, the current volunteer hosted infrastructure will crash. Such infrastructure is not cheap to maintain and donations may dry out at some point. Specially for pixelfed, loops and peertube. The fediverse may run into trouble without easy self-hosting solutions
- Which is crazy because like... you think they would have heard of linux before
  
  tbh these people would probably say linux is too niche anyways
  but, like, imagine a project that's entirely free, backed by donations, fully open-source, and so successful that it's name has become a generic term for what it is. a project so successful that basically everyone who's ever been online has used it and uses it frequently. a project so ubiquitous that almost everyone takes it for granted.
  too bad that doesn't exist!
- Imagine if someone teaches them about volunteer work

I'm glad I read the article, the dripping irony and mockery in the title for some reason didn't trigger for me until I actually started reading. The idea that someone who considered Google Plus the "next big thing" has any ability to predict the success or failure of social media platforms is indeed pretty comical.
- This is probably controversial, but Google Plus was better than Facebook in every way.
  
  Not that high of a bar, but I agree
  
  I joined Google Plus with a group of a couple dozen friends from a long-time online community, and many of us loved it! As i recall the biggest issue at launch was that you couldn't push a pay to a circle and still leave it discoverable on your timeline, without pushing it to everyone. That kinda made it more insular than it should've been. Slowly we all stopped because no one else (family, friends,) was joining.

I feel like the majority of people I see quit Mastodon do so because the platform (and Federation in general) don’t coddle their egos. With no algorithm to game and ingratiate themselves on everyone’s timelines, they make a public exit and talk about how broken Mastodon is and offer their takes on what it needs to be. Which, unsurprisingly, sounds like a non-Elon-ed Twitter.
I love Mastodon. I love discovering new people and accounts by happenstance (and not spoon-feeding).
- From a content creation standpoint, it does kind of suck. There's no ego about it. The system doesn't carry your content to nearly as many eyes, even accounting for the reduced audience. Discovery and suggestion algorithms are extremely effective, and if I'm trying to get my stuff to reach as much of my audience as possible, I wouldn't only be on Mastodon. I'm not just talking about mediocre content either - even extremely motivating stuff in the niche doesn't generate even a small fraction of engagement as regular social media sites.
  For some people, this is a benefit - it's a poorly commodified system. For small content creators trying to build an audience and generate paid subscribers, it's not enough. Most creators on Fediverse are contributing as a free or non-profit hobby.
  
  I'd prefer for my social media to not be full of ads for "content".
- We may have to just accept that it won't ever be a big platform for this very reason and just have fun there as a niche site.
  
  I’d be totally cool with that. I’ll take quality discussion with less people to talk to over huge quantities of slop and rage bait any day of the week.
  I think we need to let go of this idea that online platforms need to be as big as possible or be considered huge failures. This is a lie told by the owners of corporate-run and owned social media that needs to grow at the expense of basically everything else, because they somehow managed to convince investors to pour money into what is effectively a shitty glorified message board and they expect a return on that investment. There used to be thousands of niche forums all over the internet before corporate social media and link aggregators effectively staged a hostile takeover and homogenised everything, they did numbers that would look pathetic in comparison to daily users of X or Facebook, but they still had a busy feel balanced with a sense of community. It doesn’t actually take that many people to achieve that, it’s a fraction of what some people will have you believe.
  
  I would be totally fine with that tbh. Though I wonder if we’ll ever get to the place where a Mastodon client somehow incorporates an algorithmic timeline for those who want that?
- I didn't know it was so old. I joined in Nov 2022 and check it about as much as I check any social media. I don't really post and just boost here and there.
  Edit: Now that bluesky is (seemingly) taking off, I wonder how much of a chance it has to survive.
  
  Bluesky is still pretty centralized and venture-capital backed. There’s been discussions about monetization. It’s only a matter of time before it enshittifies.
- Yup, that's a major reason why people didn't want to leave twitter. They'd built a following that they didn't want to rebuilt.
  I know people who hated elon Musk and had accounts on other microblogging platforms, but continued to post on twitter because that's where they got their fill of engagement.
  Shifting away from reddit to lemmy is fundamentally easier than it is from Twitter to mastadon. I think it's part in due to the nature of the type of social media platforms they are.

Do we see mastodon posts here on Lemmy?
- @Wanpieserino
  Only if those posts are to/mentioning a community on Lemmy or Mbin. Profile/public posts don't show up on Lemmy since Lemmy requires all post or comment content to be associated with a group actor (AKA the community/magazine).
  @mesamunefire
  @fediverse
- @Wanpieserino @mesamunefire I'm writing this from Mastodon, and now you're seeing it.
- Yes. You can easily spot them, either with masto in the name of the user instance or from the fact that the post or comment will contained mention in the @user(orcommunity@instance format.
- Yep all the time. Other platforms allow you to subscribe as well.
  Piefed you can subscribe to individuals like they are communities. Works really well.

A nice read. I have the same opinion of the so called “tech journalists” here in Denmark. It’s crazy how little they research or know about the subject they write about.
- I remember during the initital wave of twitter refugees, a zdnet article covered bluesky and threads with glowing reviews, and then completely missed the point on mastodon, signed up for two servers, got no application back (waited 2 days) and has no idea what federation is.

I completely get that someone used to monopolies can't understand Mastodon. I don't think it has anything to do with understanding technology, though.

"Tech" journalists spend way too much time in the headlines of other outlets, getting a much too shallow idea of the actual tech that they're supposed to cover. It's quite sad that this is the state of so-called tech journalism.

If a company called TikTok can survive and thrive, surely one called Mastodon can too.
- Let's not kid ourselves the user experience is much much nicer on tiktok than on Mastadon.

Wow a really well written article. Not too long - proves it's point well - and ends nicely.

Masto-what?