friendica.eskimo.com
I don't like the clickbait title at all -- Mastodon's clearly going to survive, at least for the forseeable future, and it wouldn't surprise me if it outlives Xitter.
Still, Mastodon is struggling; most of the people who checkd it out in the November 2022 surge (or the smaller June 2023 surge) didn't stick around, and numbers have been steadily declining for the last year. The author makes some good points, and some of the comments are excellent.
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.
@dragontamer @The Nexus of Privacy
"short form content with just a few sentences per post sucks"
I agree and that's why the first site I put up was friendica, but I find on friendica, even though people have the space to express their thoughts in depth and eloquently, few do so, so perhaps Mastodon is so successful because it appeals to people who are incapable of effective self expression. At any rate, it is a reality that it is, so I do run one of those also.
What are some of the issues you'd like to see addressed? I don't use mastodon as much so I'm not familiar with what has / hasn't been done.
ex. I hear they've been working on content discovery, such as with the recommended accounts carousel
erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-ea⦠is a good overview (not by me!) of issues that the November 2022 wave ran into. What's frustrating is that so many of these are very similar to the issues the April 2017 wave ran into!
Release 4.3 did some work on the recommended accounts, that's good, but the problems start even before that. What instance to sign up to? Most people have better experiences on smaller instances that match either their interests or their geography ... but how to find them? mastodon.social is (for most people) kind of meh -- certainly not the worst, but it's not all that well-moderated, and it's big enough that the local feed isn't useful for finding interesting people or stuff -- and that's now the default. Also it took over a year to get 4.3 out; I get it, they're a small team, some stuff turned out to be a lot harder than expected, and they had to deal with a bunch of security patches in the interim ... still, that means progress is frustratingly slow.
A very informal inquiry into why some people on the Bluesky network didn't have a great time when they tried using Mastodon in the period leading up to the summer of 2023.erinkissane.com
short form content with just a few sentences per post sucks.
I 100% agree with this sentiment.
Jaron Lanier has a great book called You Are Not A Gadget, where he talks about the way we design and interact with systems, and he has some thoughts I think reflect this sentiment very well:
"When [people] design an internet service that is edited by a vast anonymous crowd, they are suggesting that a random crowd of humans is an organism with a legitimate point of view." (This is in reference to Wikis like Wikipedia)"Different media designs stimulate different potentials in human nature."
He talks about how when a system becomes popular enough, it can "lock in" a design, when others build upon it as standard. Such as how the very concept of a "file" is one we created, and nearly every system now uses it. Non-file based computing is a highly unexplored design space.
And the key part, which I think is relevant to Mastodon, the fediverse, and social media more broadly, is this quote:
"A design that share's Twitter's feature of providing ambient continuous contact between people could perhaps drop Twitter's adoration of fragments."
Fragments, of course, meaning the limited, microblogging style of communication the platform allows for.
I've seen some Mastodon instances that help with this, by not imposing character limits anywhere near where most instances would, opting for tens of thousands of characters long. But of course, there is still a limit. Another design feature by Twitter that is now locked in.
But of course, people are used to that style of social media. It's what feels normal, inevitable even. Changing it would mean having to reconceptualize social media as a concept, and might be something people aren't interested in, since they're too used to the original design. We can't exactly tell.
As Lanier puts it,
"We don't really know, because it is an unexplored design space."
Non-file based computing is a highly unexplored design space.
No it isn't; that's what databases are.
I'm not a big expert on database technology, but I am aware of there being at least a few database systems ("In-Memory") that use the RAM of the computer for transient storage, and since RAM doesn't use files as a concept in the same way, the data stored there isn't exactly inside a "file," so to speak.
That said, they are absolutely dwarfed by the majority of databases, which use some kind of file as a means to store the database, or the contents within it.
Obviously, that's not to say using files is bad in any way, but the possibilities for how database software could have developed, had we not used files as a core computing concept during their inception, are now closed off. We simply don't know what databases could have looked like, because of "lock-in."
That's what some databases are. Most databases you'll see today still inevitably store the whole contents of the DB within a file with its own format, metadata, file extension, etc, or store the contents of the database within a file tree.
The notion of "lock in" being used here doesn't necessarily mean that alternatives don't or can't exist, but that comparatively, investment into development, and usage, of those systems, is drastically lower.
Think of how many modern computing systems involve filesystems as a core component of their operation, from databases, to video games, to the structure of URLs, which are essentially usually just ways to access a file tree. Now think of how many systems are in use that don't utilize files as a concept.
The very notion of files as an idea is so locked-in, that we can rarely fathom, let alone construct a system that doesn't utilize them as a part of its function.
Regardless, the files example specifically wasn't exactly meant to be a direct commentary on the state of microblogging platforms, or of all technology, but more an example for analogy purposes than anything else.
What social media platforms don't have some kind of character limit?
What platforms don't use a feed?
What platforms don't use a like button?
What platforms don't have some kind of hashtags?
All of these things are locked-in, not necessarily technologically, but socially.
Would more people from Reddit have switched to Lemmy if it didn't have upvotes and downvotes? Are there any benefits or tradeoffs to including or not including the Save button on Lemmy, and other social media sites? We don't really know, because it's substantially less explored as a concept.
The very notion of federated communities on Lemmy being instance-specific, instead of, say, instances all collectively downloading and redistributing any posts to a specific keyword acting as a sort of global community not specific to any one instance, is another instance of lock-in, adapted from the fediverse's general design around instance-specific hosting and connection.
In the world of social media, alternative platforms, such as Minus exist, that explore unique design decisions not available on other platforms, like limited total post counts, vague timestamps, and a lack of likes, but compared to all the other sites in the social media landscape, it's a drop in the bucket.
The broader point I was trying to make was just that the very way microblogging developed as a core part of social media's design means that any shift away from it likely won't actually gain traction with a mainstream audience, because of the social side of the lock-in.
Also, short form content with just a few sentences per post sucks
Your post could fit on Mastodon
My post above is 376 characters, which would have required three tweets under the original 140 character limit.
Mastodon, for better or worse, has captured a bunch of people who are hooked on the original super-short posting style, which I feel is a form of Newspeak / 1984-style dumbing down of language and discussion that removed nuance. Yes, Mastodon has removed the limit and we have better abilities to discuss today, but that doesn't change the years of training (erm... untraining?) we need to do to de-program people off of this toxic style.
Especially when Mastodon is trying to cater to people who are used to tweets.
Your post could fit on Mastodon
EDIT: and second, Mastodon doesn't have the toxic-FOMO effect that hooks people into Twitter (or Threads, or Bluesky).
People post not because short sentences are good. They post and doom-scroll because they don't want to feel left out of something. Mastodon is healthier for you, but also less intoxicating / less pushy. Its somewhat doomed to failure, as the very point of these short posts / short-engagement stuff is basically crowd manipulation, FOMO and algorithmic manipulation.
Without that kind of manipulation, we won't get the kinds of engagement on Mastodon (or Lemmy for that matter).
Microblogging is definitely useful for many things, short and quick thoughts, links to news articles, jokes, memes etc. You can also comment and share things easily. Microblogging actually resembles instant messaging in a lot of ways, just with an undefined βgroup chatβ size.
I find it kinda funny that Twitter has become so toxic that people start thinking there must be something wrong with the format.
Also RSS clearly canβt replicate a big chunk of the desirable properties of microblogging (eg. easy sharing and commenting).
They are in competition with Mastodon, and have a marketing budget.
Five years from now, those platforms will become enshittified as their budgets dry up. They will need to milk the users for revenue. Well see another surge in a few years, until they learn that Mastodon is actually better.
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.
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.
ZING!
And dipshit elon literally argued in court that "twitter doesn't exist anymore"
HMMM MAYBE SOMEBODY SHOULD INVENT IT
i have a mastodon account but itβs 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.
You may have heard of Folsom Street Fair? The sex & kink positive, all-inclusive, world-famous, 2-day long, San Francisco street fair?
For the first time in over 2 decades of attending my husband and I were turned away from the new, unmarked, Trans & Non-Binary Gate & Safe Space because we werenβt, nor did we identify, as such.
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.
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:
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.
I disagree with your and the author's conclusions.
I have made my own long comment about it in thread, so here I am going to focus on your chart.
First, I will accept the data of the chart at face value, it seems resonably accurate and I don't have any other data to work off of.
My point is that you are interpreting it wrong.
To me the declining slopes after the sruges are not relevant to any long term conclusions, they follow a highly predictable curve and doesn't mean much.
If you look at the end of the graphs you can even see it growing slightly, that is obviously not evidence of anything yet, but to me it is an indication of either a start of another surge, or stability.
I believe you are too quick at spreading doom for Mastodon, give it half a year and look at the stats then, we won't see a meteoric rise of active users any time soon, just accept it and work with more realistic expectations.
First, I will accept the data of the chart at face value, it seems resonably accurate and I donβt have any other data to work off of.
If you do find another source of data, please post it. Relying on a single source (like the Fediverse Observer) is problematic, I know.
To me the declining slopes after the sruges are not relevant to any long term conclusions, they follow a highly predictable curve and doesnβt mean much.
You're conflating the sharp drops after the surges with the declining slopes.
The sharp drops (like MAU from 12/2022 to 02/2023) go as you said, they don't mean much. However, the declining slopes are relevant - they span across multiple months (up to ten), and show that Mastodon userbase has a consistent tendency to shrink.
If you look at the end of the graphs you can even see it growing slightly, that is obviously not evidence of anything yet, but to me it is an indication of either a start of another surge, or stability.
We'll only know if it's an indication of a surge (sudden influx of new users), or growth (slow influx), or stability in the future. For now it's an isolated data point.
I believe you are too quick at spreading doom for Mastodon
I'm saying that Mastodon is struggling. I did not say that Mastodon is doomed.
The difference is important here because a struggling network can be still saved, while a doomed one can't.
The slopes you meassure are still tied to the preceeding surges, so I can't treat them as any indication of success/failure.
To me it kinda looks like we are in the trough of disillusionment, which is a normal period of any new tech/system.
With improvements to the network we soon hit the slope of enlightenment.
Context for other users - the user above is likely referring to the Gartner cycle:
As anyone here can see, it looks nothing like that pattern that I've highlighted.
If the success condition for Mastodon is "to become a long-term viable and attractive alternative to corporate-owned microblogging", then improvements of the platform are necessary.
To be clear on my opinion in this matter: I want to see Mastodon to succeed, I want to see X and Threads closing down, and IDGAF about Bluesky. However I'm not too eager to engage in wishful belief and pretend that everything is fine - because acknowledging the problem is always the first step to solve it.
You are absolutely right that I am refering to the Gartner cycle.
It doesn't fit exactly, but the general pattern fit very well with the first half.
The Mastodon graph just happens to have two hype sections.
A model that explains well half of the data is as useful as a coin toss. But let's roll with it, and pretend that we got two superimposed Gartner cycles here.
The trough would be reached after a sharp drop after the peak, and based on the first peak it would be ~2 months long. That would explain only the period between 2023-07 and 2023-09; the rest of what I've pointed out in red is clearly something else, the nearest of what they look like would be a sick version of the "slope of enlightenment" - going down instead of up.
Yeah, the model doesn't work.
A better way to approach this is to consider three things:
Once you notice those things, it gets really easy to explain what's happening:
By analysing the data this way, not just we're describing it better, but we can also see where Mastodon needs to improve:
What I'm saying also partially applies to the "Fediverse link aggregators", like Lemmy. Lemmy does show some tendency to bleed users, but in smaller degree than Mastodon; but it's in a better position because there's only one big competitor, and it keeps fucking it up over and over.
Half the users of the initial peek are still active?
Doesn't sound too bad if there would be events that bring new users from time to time.
you donβt sell a novel tech named after an extinct animal
They didn't, Mastodon is named after the metal band (which is named after the extinct animal) π
Either way, back in 2008 I bet people were making fun of Twitter for being named after bird sounds, so.
I wasn't aware of the connection with the band - thanks for the info! Still, people are bound to associate "mastodon" first and foremost with the critter.
Either way, back in 2008 I bet people were making fun of Twitter for being named after bird sounds, so.
I don't remember but you're likely correct. There's a difference though - Twitter didn't need to capitalise on every single tiny advantage, Mastodon does it, and while the role of branding might be small it still gives you (or your competitors) some edge.
Mastodon is not struggling.
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.
But the issue is that the temporary surges are not even followed by stability, they're followed by decline. That's not a recipe for sustainability.
Donβt sell Mastodon short.
Alternative analysis: it doesn't help it to pretend there's not a problem.
But the issue is that the temporary surges are not even followed by stability, theyβre followed by decline. Thatβs not a recipe for sustainability.
You mean after a surge there's less active users than before?
I tried to replace Twitter by Mastodon but, in the end, I just left Twitter and donβt use Mastodon at all. The main reason I think is because the Β« onboarding Β» 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 donβt find people by yourself, no one is going to see your posts and so, you wonβt be able to find new people to follow by posting.
I donβt 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.
I tried to replace Twitter by Mastodon but, in the end, I just left Twitter and donβt use Mastodon at all.
This is me, I left Twitter, Facebook and Reddit. I reduced my online time a lot and it is better for my mental health and I have more time for my hobbies.
Mastodon made it clear to me how much algorithms steer me and keep me online, when I don't need that, don't profit from it. When I had to search for content on Mastodon that was for me it felt not worth the effort while being fed by an algorithm on Twitter /Facebook / Reddit kept me endlessly scrolling.
So I am very thankful to Mastodon for opening my eyes, but I will not use it anymore. Tchncs (world news, tech news and ~~cat~~ owl pictures) , Grouvee (gaming forum, keeping track of my games) and German Tagesschau ( tv news of my country) is enough to stay up to date and I feel freed from a burden that social media became for me.
Also my phone stays in my bag now and I am more in the moment wherever I am - I have used it 99% less than before and my next smart phone will be a cheap one with the only must haves being the newest Android version and a replacable battery so it will last me for long.
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.
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. π
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 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.
The first rule of Mastodon is "filter the term 'Mastodon'".
While you're at it, filter out mentions of any other social media you can think of. All of that metadiscourse is apparently important for people to get off their chests, buy it's numbing to read.
I'm fairly happy using Mastodon, but the lack of algorithms made it necessary to curate my feed very strictly. I turned off boosts/reposts in my app, too, and I now have a slow-moving, low-drama newsfeed that doesn't stress me out just opening it.
Mastodon is 10 years younger and has 0.24% of Twitterβs user-base.
Theyβre doing great!
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
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?
I don't want to follow random people though? Twitter was useful as a way to follow specific companies and people to know when say, a service goes down or an update is released.
These people and companies aren't on Mastodon.
Yeah, chicken and egg. Unfortunate twitter has now locked down feeds so you have to be logged in, so also fuck them on that point.
It's a tradeoff. I am so disgusted by twitter that I chose to give that up and leave.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
