Mastodon has been around since 2016 and has 804k MAU.
The platform has 57 third party apps.
The platform is decentralized and has community ran servers.
it’s been better marketed, and people struggle with the concept of federation and picking a server. and I guess the invite-only, artificial exclusivity strat has actually paid off for them initially, unlike for Google+.
also, a matter of culture. I’ve seen many newcomers complain about how some long time users act as HOA, reminding everyone to act according to the long-standing rules. many people of colour have experience many forms of racist behaviour, too, which has driven some communities away.
oh, and the federation/defederation business sometimes gets way too messy, which [cynic mode on] makes it difficult for people who want their Personal Brand™ to gain as many followers as possible over the entire network.
people struggle with the concept of federation and picking a server
This is a HUGE reason. I didn’t know when I first signed up for Lemmy that I was on what is essentially a tankie instance. I didn’t know when I signed up for Pixelfed that I wasn’t going to be able to see shit because the first server I signed up for wasn’t really federated with anyone and I’ve mostly given up on it. I still can’t see a bunch of stuff on Mastodon without switching through several accounts with no rhyme or reason.
I’ve said before that I obviously like it here because I’m using the services, but it’s not easy. Most people don’t know about the fediverse, and most of those that do want to be passive about maintaining their social media. Most of the fediverse is built for nerds.
Language filter in bluesky is much better than Mastodon as well
Mastodon relies on users setting the language their post is in manually, so if someone posts in two languages and forgets to switch between them, they don’t get filtered out. I know there are some other pieces of software that switch it automatically, I’m fairly sure Calckey automatically recognized the language you were writing in.
I already toggle the Mastodon settings to ensure that I got the feeds to the language I want (I want English only) and I still got feeds on different languages such as German and French
I mute a few more non-English accounts each time I use Mastodon
again, if the person who is making the post doesn’t change the setting, it won’t get filtered. if they type a message in German but the post’s language option is set to English (which I think is the default on some major instances), it won’t get filtered out.
you can usually check what their post’s setting is by starting writing a reply to them, as the language option of your post will switch to the one they post in.
That is why Mastodon is hard to get mainstream because not everyone wants extra effort to do this. Even, Twitter, threads and bluesky much better to filter their language content
Average users do not even remotely care about federated software and/or decentralisation. That is techno-babble to them and their eyes will glaze over if you try to market that to them.
That being said: Mastodon does a shit job at explaining how it works, how to use it, and what its advantages are. The Joinmastodon landing page just assumes you already know how a fair bit about instances work and what federated software is and does a very poor job explaining it. And even then, most users won’t care either way. They just want to click a Join button and be done.
That’s exactly what drove me into seeking out Lemmy instead. I hopped on Mastodon and it made me feel like I was being coralled into following some niche hobby forum exclusively, and I wasn’t into that. It didn’t explain that the instance itself was largely irrelevant and that the rest of the platform would open up to me after choosing one.
Lemmy still had a learning curve, but having experience with reddit I was able to pick it up easily enough.
It’s shiny, they advertise, put in a money to spread the word. And the onboarding process probably is way easier?! Also back when Mastodon was in the media, it wasn’t yet the right time. Now, especially with Musk, it is. And the attention is on Bluesky since that is newer and what’s hyped right now.
@hendrik do they advertise? Honest question :blobBone_dance:
I wouldn’t know, I have a lot of adblockers etc. But it gets to me via word of mouth. And it’s been in the media a lot this year. Due to their business decisions, new approach, novelty… That’s something they did very well. They also took care building some hype and anticipation with their invite-only period. Mastodon has also been in the news. But that was yesterday’s news and I suppose everyone forgets yesterday’s news.
You want the bullshit “Mastodon is too complicated and hard to use!” answer or the real answer?
BlueSky has rich people behind it.
They’re the same answer.
You need money to market applications to users. Bluesky is sold the same way that Twitter is, your favorite moron celebrity might hit like or retweet on your stuff.
They aren’t really the same answer.
People suggest that Mastodon is too complicated for the average knuckle-dragging moron to use (and it might be, but frankly I consider that a pro, not a con) because it has “servers”, as if the entire point of the internet wasn’t to have a global network of communication across a multitude of clients and servers. Do these same people think the concept of websites and email are also too complex for the regular person? Maybe… But again, if the regular person is that fucking dumb do we really want have them in our community at all?
What’s more, BlueSky is supposedly federated (or “will be”™), and as such it’ll have to deal with all of the same challenges around federation that Mastodon deals with, and people are kidding themselves if they think otherwise.
Otherwise I agree with your last sentence. Social media is about money and fame, first and foremost. The average person will always go where the most money and fame are concentrated.
Tbf the internet is entirely comprised of like 6 websites if you ask the average Joe, and I’m damn inclined to agree as someone who remembers webrings fondly and misses geocities (it’s like the bell curve meme lol, and btw yes I know about neocities I’m just sleeping on it).
But I agree, if they can email they can mastodon, it’s the same shit.
Mastodon is a pain in the ass to get signed up for anyone under room temperature IQ, so, like, most of Twitter’s users, even the ones smart enough to leave.
It’s the path of least resistance to achieve Musklessness. The second two of the positives you listed are actually negatives to the average Joe. Choice paralysis, overwhelming number of apps and servers, these are things that put people off even trying, especially if there are easier-to-use alternatives that are familiar and instant.
Mastodon is great, but it’s not quite there yet in terms of convenience. Too much copying and pasting and clicking through to different instances in order to read old posts etc. It needs to be more cohesive in a way that doesn’t require constantly leaving your timeline or going into the settings.
It’s also the case that the Twitter diaspora who are famous tend to choose BlueSky, and that brings a lot of people along with them.
And it’s also the case that Mastodon doesn’t have much of a marketing campaign outside of word-of-mouth, whereas BlueSky does.
Do you use Mastodon on the web or app?
Interest in hobbies related to commercial brands (following sports, movie franchises, etc.)
When you even mention that you’d like to follow brand accounts, people start shouting at you how commercial scum needs to be banned/defederated.
Of course people move to platforms where their interests are represented.
You have to understand we are not normal users. Anyone even remotely interested in federated software are not normal users.
Bluesky may not have 57 third party apps and that’s why people are flocking to it. It’s easy. The signup process through the app involved no selecting of servers, no understanding of what it actually is under the hood, and users are greeted by a default algorithm that feels very much like old Twitter before Musk.
Basically, regular users do not care about the fediverse and just want a competent and polished app and site experience.
@Sunshine I’ve shared my thoughts a couple times in similar threads 1 and 2, but to summarize:
One reason is because I think other protocols have some advantages. AT is better end user ease of use wise, and plans to let you control your account via a keypair (already possible with your own PDS). Nostr is more heavily decentralized and considerably more flexible than the other two. That can siphon off existing users or have new users drawn to those spaces. Not to say that ActivityPub doesn’t also have its own advantages too, but everybody has different preferences and there’s now more choice.
There’s also some Activity Pub specific toxicity issues. Too aggressive defederation leads to a point where you can’t communicate with most people, and there’s some opinions in the space that have turned some people away.
But of course things go up and down, and are never a strait line. I’m guessing all three big protocols will continue to grow, and as they get more interconnected everybody wins, and even if Activity Pub has hit a slump the ecosystem of people you can talk to using it has grown 10x+.
Outside if summarizing my previous takes, there have been some new(ish) things I’ve seen that don’t quite sit right. Things from the top down like the social web director refusing to go to conferences that people from other protocols will be present and encouraging people to not even talk about other protocols. Or - anicdotally - seeing random users happy that the influxes are going to others because they don’t want ‘normies’ on Activity Pub or declaring anybody still using Twitter/X a Nazi sympathizer if not an outright Nazi. If the Activity Pub scene is getting really protectionist it could start also having a negative effect.
Again, overall I expect it to continue trending upwards, and there’s a plethora of factors that are unrelated to anything negative regarding Activity Pub’s community, but the above (and previous two posts) are the stuff I figured worth bringing up and potentially factors in why ActivityPub has seen weaker adoption compared to the other two big ones more recently.
I wrote an article on this last night.
Since bluesky is mit licensed, what’s to stop a fork if something goes wrong?
what’s to stop a activitypub and atproto compatibility?
Can you guys help explain it to someone completely inexperienced?
I had Twitter but only used it for following music venues to see upcoming events and bars for happy hour updates. I have a Mastodon account but only played with it for a few minutes because i didn’t really get it. I don’t understand following a person. What can one person have to say that i would care enough about to download an app. What am i missing?
Imagine if there were two twitters, and you only sign up for one but you can read and comment on posts for both.
Now imagine if anybody can install their own Twitter, and anybody else can sign up on either one, and they can all talk to each other like that.
It wasn’t why Mastodon. It was why Twitter or twitter-like apps.
It isn’t one person that people go onto a micro blogging service for, but a variety of people.
It’s just easier. I have both but I almost never use Mastodon anymore. Federation there doesn’t seem to work right. I didn’t know what an instance was so I joined mastodon.social. Finding and following people in the app doesn’t always seem to work right if they’re on another instance. Doing it in a browser is even more painful.
The people I liked to follow and interact with on X, many tried Mastodon and abandoned it, and many more are now on Bluesky. This creates momentum to “follow the crowd” as it were.
Additionally, you only have one chance to make a first impression. A lot of us tried Mastodon earlier and it wasn’t ready. Bluesky started as invite-only, which drummed up interest before catching this zeitgeist of people leaving X.
Lastly, and maybe it’s just me, but the font sizing on the official Mastodon app on Android is generally too small and can’t be changed. Bluesky allows me to change it and make it more comfortable to use.
Evidentially mastodon makes it hard to find people on purpose unless you know their name “to stop harassment” I’m told, except I’m not sure how it does that at all and it just makes it harder to use the damn platform. That’s my one real complaint about mastodon.
Because no one made a droolproof guide to migrating to Mastodon and Bluesky put money into it.
For people who can’t remember their password, it’s preferable.
I remember the “big movement” when Twitter turned into a right wing cesspool.
At first, the biggest problem was that there were TWO main alternatives: Mastodon and Bluesky. So those who left split into two groups, ending up with a dead timeline, missing out on news. (I and my “bubble” use it to keep up with Covid vaccines, politics, safety etc.)
I joined the Mastodon group, because it solves the problem of a single crazy billionaire potentially buying & enshittifying it. But I fully admit that it is not user friendly at all. People who are not in IT just want it to WORK, like Twitter used to. They don’t want to “educate themselves” about servers, fediverse and networks. The user experience clearly hasn’t even been a thing. It’s techies writing software for themselves. What it needs is a full analysis of the experience from the start: Who are you, user, why are you considering Mastodon, what are your expectations, what are the experiences in the first 30 seconds after entering “mastadon” (oh, you misspelled it?) or “twitter alternative” into a search engine, etc. “pick an instance” is already the passive-aggressive demand nobody wants to hear.
In the end, my instance was shut down without a fair warning, all the reconnected and new contacts lost, no option to move. Trying Bluesky now, but many stayed at Twitter (now X), moved to Mastodon with or without success (most onto my dead instance), or gave up on microblogging.
I think we need something simple again. I remember what SUSE did for Linux in the 90s. Linux users were all like: Only debian is even somewhat useable, but if you should really do LFS. Non-techies willing to switch for “political” or other reasons were hit in the face with “Pick a distro!!!”. SUSE has been called “the Windows among the Linux distros” by those people, but it did the right thing. It provided exactly the simplification we needed: “This is Linux, you simply buy it on CD in a retail store like your other software, you run the installer.” It was a good thing.
IRC is the one good old thing that still works great. When they tried to enshittify freenode, we just moved, collectively. Many non-IT channels & servers died after 2010, though.
At least for Japanese users, they want to see content they love from creators relevant to them. Creators = illustrator, comic artist, photographer, cosplayer, writer, etc.
Creators want a stable platform that allows them to widen their reach and potentially making more money.
Mastodon at the moment are tend to be hostile against creators that wants to monetize their work. Not to forget, the creator you want to follow are on defederated or blocks your instance for random admin drama.
But hey, at least fediverse software like Misskey actually trying to serve these community. Like allowing community ads (like promoting indie comics, vtuber, or social event) and trying to be stable by resolving any potential instance problem together with zero drama. Misskey community also often have tendency to “decoupling from Western tech supremacy”
