I’ve been using fediverse stuff (Mastodon and, most recently, Calckey – I’m just going to use “Mastodon” as shorthand here, purists can bite me) for over a year now, a…
I’m not sure it failed.
I joined Mastodon in Apr 03, 2017 - but was never really very active because - well, there wasn’t really much to be active with. It was ghost town. But it grew slowly and organically. Which was OK.Then the big Twitter meltdown happened in Nov 22 and all of a sudden we got couple of million new users. There was a lot of adjustment, from new people and the old inhabitants. It wasn’t very pretty (the whole CW debacle).
Many of those millions left and (presumably) went back to Twitter. But many stayed. The twitter InfoSec community is (mostly) on Mastodon now. Quite a lot of science-twitter is as well. We’re far bigger place now than we were before 22.
Twitter didn’t crash and burn (yet). People went back. But I don’t think the migration failed. Some stayed and we’re richer place for it.
But I agree with lot of the things in the post. Dealing with federation, quirky UI’s, prototype services (hi kbin!) and other linuxesque peculiarities isn’t what mainstream is looking for. The whole “just spin up your own fedi-server” might not be very sustainable/environmentally friendly compared to centralized well maintained datacenter. There are lot of problems to solve before fediverse is “mainstream ready”.
But to be quite honest. I’m not sure it needs to be. Yes, I get that it’s hard to “build following” without mainstream, but to be honest, I actually prefer more signal and less noise. And lot of the “mainstream” is just noise who follow popular accounts because they’re popular.
I still don’t get why people wanna stay, all the toxic users get now top priority (a.k.a. people who pay for Twitter Blue) and they promote toxic tweets
Because all of the users they like and want to talk to stayed there too.
Network effects are a powerful driver. They can be overcome, but not easily.
I think a lot of it too is people don’t want to lean a new system. I’ve seen multiple big influencers on Twitter basically day they had no interest in using Mastodon because they didn’t want to learn a new platform and so instead the begrudgingly keep using Twitter. People don’t like change and will sometimes torture themselves to avoid it
To an extent, influencers wouldn’t get on with Mastodon anyway.
Looking at it charitably from their point of view, the discovery is so poor that actually building a following there is a huge amount of work they probably won’t see a return on. It’s a much smaller audience that in no small part resents even the idea of an “influencer” - someone who has that as their line of work is going to struggle and consider it not worth their time.
Looking at it less charitably, Mastodon does not reward activity on its own but instead things only get attention if they’re actually worth attention, so carpet-bombing fedi with posts most people don’t actually value is a waste of their time, and it’s a lot more effort than such people would typically be willing to expend.
I don’t think there was a failure, there’s like 10 million users more than there used to be in just a few months. The more these social media companies fuck over their users, we’ll keep seeing the waves come crashing in.
I can understand these arguments, and yet…
I invested lots of time into Google+ and built up a following of 26,000 there. Then it closed down days before I started my Patreon campaign. Yes, I am still bitter about that.
Then I shifted my attention to Twitter. And then, last year, Elon Musk took it over.
I am done investing effort in corporate-owned social media sites that must inevitably follow the #Enshittification principle. No, Mastodon (and the Fediverse in general) did not absorb as many Twitter users as we hoped. Still, I think in the long run the Fediverse will grow, as corporate social media proves again and again that they cannot be trusted.
Being someone who is on Mastodon and also have to still be on Twitter for professional reasons, I consistently get way more engagement to my posts on Mastodon.
Plus, I have been able to build a larger following in Mastodon within a year than I was able to in Twitter in the eight years or so I have had an account there.
Anybody who expected Mastodon to simply become Twitter minus Elon Musk, was being naive and that didn’t exactly happen. But as a platform on its own, Mastodon is a success. As a user, I consistently see more interesting content on Mastodon than Twitter or pretty much any other social media platform (except maybe Reddit till they decided to screw up).
Honestly, I would recommend everyone here who hasn’t already to sign up to a Mastodon server in addition to Kbin.
