Long read but well worth it if you care.
Edit: I found the author’s initial posts on Mastodon. It’s also well-worth the read.
The people who accept these trade-offs are not normal, and they’re in charge
so this is just inflammatory?
Seriously, I have been trying and slowly learning as Linux too has been developed to be more user friendly, am I “failing”?
This is a really poor take by someone it feels like spent more time on this post and the complaints than trying at all to adapt to the new place.
Like this bit:
So what does Mastodon bring to the table in addition to Twitter, that might justify someone deciding to take the plunge and move to it? There are a few unique things about the platform, but they generally fall into the broad category of “things users don’t care about”. Chief among these is decentralisation.
You wat? I want a place to talk to people, REAL PEOPLE, about topics (and that can be searched using hashtags, which you can).
The point of Mastodon is it isn’t Twitter but offers a lot of the socializing of twitter! What?!
They really let just anyone post anything.
I definitely care about decentralization, I think the author of this article assumes a lot about user opinion.
Yeah but since we’re not “normal” (read, mindless users) we don’t count as “real”.
It also isn’t that Mastodon is necessarily a replacement for Twitter (or Lemmy for reddit). I use these communities vastly differently than I did those two places: I am much more involved and feel like an actual part of my curated communities. I’m not a lurker or a pair of potential eyes to be advertised at.
The ways that our Fediverse options are different are myriad and immensely important in a way that most outside observers don’t get. These aren’t “just replacements” at all; they’re communities—and upgraded ones at that.
Well, he’s got a point in the first part you quoted.
Most “regular” people, the not-techies, are simply not interested in the technology or ideology behind a product. And Mastodon is a product in that sense.
What counts for most people is convenience, price and utilitity. If Mastodon adds complexity to the usage or lacks the content momentum, it’s simply not attractive to most regular people. And that’s not a hurr-durrr normies stupid rant, that’s how most people feel about most things. You probably don’t really care, how the oats in your oatmeal were produced, or your shirt, etc. You may would choose the morally superior one of you’d have the choice, but would you go out of your way to find that product?
Whether that counts as “failing” is a completely different question. But if the mission of Mastodon is to take over the position Twitter and Facebook have today, well then there’s definitely a good chance it’s failing that mission.
So I read the whole thing, and it sounds like highly opinionated ramblings of one individual I never heard of, with a catchy headline to rank high in current search trends.
This “here is why” bullshit was first used by Buzzfeed and other cringe clickbait generators and should be avoided like the plague.
Yeah, decentralized is the default state of internet, you can always be disconnected from the WAN like some countries decided to do for their citizens. It wasn’t this connected in the first place, it was very volatile as servers can go down for whatever reason, that’s exactly why early servers have all those mirror options.(so you bookmark several address and visit another if the main one is down.)
And finding good community was a hassle but worth it. It’s the same for fediverse but now we have good protocols and search function/engine.
Honestly I think the idea of hundreds of tiny instances of Mastodon or Lemmy is not the way the fediverse should work. It probably won’t work that way because it doesn’t scale well. However, having a half-dozen or so large instances would give you almost the entire benefit without as many of the issues. Would Reddit be having a meltdown right now if there was even just one other instance of Reddit everyone could move to?
I think federation and centralization is the key to success.
Yeah, that’s largely what happened with email too. It’s a decentralised network but most people just pick a big provider and stick with that (which is absolutely fine)
Well, good news then. The vast majority of Mastodon and Lemmy users are on just a few big instances.
Those who are not, have their reasons. That’s ok, the big instances will still work as you expect. There is no reason to “centralize” people who intentionally want to remain on the periphery
Eh. Bad take imo. It might be failing this individual, or failing to be a clone of Twitter, but it’s certainly not this black and white. It’s experienced massive growth as has the larger fediverse (a success by one measure for sure). Will it capture significant market/mindshare compared to the big social networks? Maybe, maybe not. But this isn’t necessarily the “goal”. Meta has taken an interest, so clearly it has gotten the attention of one of the big dogs. Blue sky is a Twitter clone but has the promise of “federation”, which again you see signs of imitation (sincerest form of flattery right?). I don’t disagree with everything OP has to say. I do think the software, UX, and other aspects of Mastodon and other fediverse “things” could use some work but that’s the best thing, they’re being worked on! And faster than ever, especially as more of the big corps continue to enshittify and drive away their user base. To claim that Mastodon has “failed” or “is failing” is not only ridiculously premature but also imo missing the larger trends. For me, it has been a huge success and continues to get better.
I read the first half and skimmed the rest. The primary complaints seem to be that the fediverse isn’t centralized, monolithic, stupid easy to use, and just like every corporate controlled network.
Ok. Cool. Fine with me. I wouldn’t call it failure if it is what it set out to be.
Also there’s that odd idea most people have that unless a thing has majority “market share”, or already the mentum to overtake the market leader, that thing has failed.
The fediverse isn’t even commercial, it’s not on the “market” to begin with. And it’s consistently growing.
Even if it weren’t, that’s still not a failure. It literally doesn’t need to make any money at all to keep doing its thing.
It’s just a shining example of how MBA-brain has infested tech spaces, possibly irreparably.
Tech is driven by the up-or-out, billion-users-or-death, monopoly-or-bankruptcy mentality to the point that it’s leaked from investors to management to average employees and, shockingly, most of the fediverse is tech or tech-adjacent types so it’s not really surprising that this mentality is extremely prevalent: you go with what you know, and if you’re in tech it’s growth growth growth.
Regardless of if, say, Lemmy ends up with 10 million MAUs or 10,000 MAUs, or 1,000 MAUs, the measure of success is NOT how many users, but if the users who ARE there find value and worth in what exists. If you’ve got 1,000 happy users sharing ideas and conversing meaningfully then congrats! you created immense value, just uh, no money.
OP, did you editorialize the title?
Here’s is the article’s actual title: Why did the #TwitterMigration fail?
The original title is accurate, but I wouldn’t say that your editorialized title is accurate. This is a piece about Mastadon almost exclusively (yes the author uses it as a shorthand, but most of the arguments are ultmalty Mastadon-specific).
I too had a Mastadon account and I too no longer use it. Why? The big problem with Mastadon (and with Twitter) is that most of the value is in fiollowing celebrities, and the celebritites want to reach the widest audience possible, which for now is still Twitter.
The value in reddit is in the community. That’s a fundamental difference and it is extremly portable.
Besides that, the author has some poor takes:
Decentralisation makes the user experience worse
Yes it does. As does monetization. However, unlike monetization, the worse user experience from decentralisation is temporary as it is merely a development problem and there is incentive for the community to make the experience better and they are doing just that. Corporate interests, however, have incentives to make the user experience on their traditional platforms worse. See: enshittification. Cory Doctrow said it better than anyone else will.
The people who accept these trade-offs are not normal, and they’re in charge
The author compares this to linux, but the analogy really is much closer to… the Internet. The internet was pioneered by nerds and social outcasts, and maybe the author is too young to know this but for a long time using the internet was very uncool. Arguably Twitter was very unpopular when it first hit the scene. Of course it changed quickly as the tide was already shifting towards online being the new trendy place by then.
it sent out about 700,000 kill messages to inform other instances that it had federated with that it was going offline for good, and to delete all record of it from their databases. Around 25% of these were returned undelivered because the instances had simply dropped offline.
It’s amusing that the person complaining about these instances “failing” linked to a site that itself has “failed” and is now “for sale”.
There are always “the sky is falling” posts by people that feel everything they are no longer in love or becomes slightly difficult with is “failing”. I don’t understand why these people always think others are going to care about their opinions on the subject at all. It makes me wonder if these people yell “I’M LEAVING” every time they exit a room.
Yes, yes they do. I know several people who feel the insufferable need to loudly announce that fun can commence because they’re now here, and that fun should stop, because they’re now leaving.
…I really really try to avoid them.
That’s like….your opinion, man….
Quick TLDR from ChatGPT for those who don’t want to go through it all:
The article discusses the decline in active user numbers on the Mastodon social media platform and explores potential reasons behind it. The author shares personal experiences and observations from using Mastodon and highlights several issues. Firstly, they argue that Mastodon does not offer a unique selling point compared to other platforms like Twitter, which are more feature-rich. The author also states that decentralization, a key aspect of Mastodon, is not a selling point for the majority of users who prioritize functionality and convenience over ideological considerations. They further criticize the user experience on Mastodon, particularly in terms of finding and following other users, and argue that decentralization hampers the platform’s usability. Additionally, the article discusses the perspective of existing Mastodon users, who may be resistant to change and less attuned to the challenges faced by new users. Lastly, the author mentions the scalability issues of Mastodon and the lack of sustainable funding models due to the platform’s aversion to advertising and corporate funding. Overall, the article suggests that Mastodon’s shortcomings and its resistance to change may have contributed to its declining user numbers.
I’m not under the impression that the Fediverse is directly competing with mainstream social media. At least within the spaces that I belong to. I’m just tired of all the clickbait ragebait easy engagement posts online
If someone stays in Twitter and Reddit just because Mastodon and Lemmy are “difficult” I do not want those people here theycabn stay on their comfort zone.
Yeah, the “difficult” part, I don’t understand. I’m 56 and figured out /kbin and Mastodon and how federation works within a few hours. So far, so good.
I was around for the early days of Fark, Digg, Twitter and Reddit. New sites are rough around the edges. That’s just the way it is. Things will get sorted in due time.
This is a pretty dogshit take, homie.
This is third place I am posting this to, but whatever:
When the Twitter migration happened, a lot of folks got overenthusiastic about the idea of the fediverse and started setting up their own Mastodon instances, despite having little to no experience with selfhosting before.
A lot of such instances have since shut down as they realised the amount of efforts that actually needs into hosting such a platform, especially instances with open registrations. However, a large number of them did survive and are now thriving.
Has the growth rate slowed? Sure, just like it is expected happen after a sudden influx. But it is false to say that Mastodon growth has stalled. Instead, the phrase I would use is ‘stabilized’. Mastodon growth has stabilized into a healthy level as user growth is now happening more organically. Some stats below:
12,808,214 accounts +217,864 in the last week
Stats on most active instances:
By number of users:
https://i.postimg.cc/fb6FyY89/Screenshot-20230625-121432-Firefox.jpgBy number of posts:
https://i.postimg.cc/cCWbM0y1/Screenshot-20230625-121509-Firefox.jpgHow can anyone look at these numbers and say that the growth has stalled?
Depends what your definition of success is
The most interesting thing to me is the scaling issue it seems like we need something like a torrent distribution method as the transport layer rather than sending out 400 connections.
i’ve been thinking similar things or use some other P2P model like those used by crypto nodes/i2p/tor. and maybe blockchain can serve a different purpose in order to bring validity to instances so as to not have bad actors fuck with the data as well as giving us a way to collectively boot them from federating should their reputation tank… dunno, not an expert in this area at all.
“This thing is bad because I don’t like it”
