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.
Because none of those points matter to the average user.
I tried bluesky (bs?) for 5 minutes. Clicked one thing, saw the comment “Sunsets are my love language,” and realized that these are not my people.
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.
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”
because bsky actually listened to their users and implemented features they asked for unlike mastodon who attacked migrators during the first twitter migration.
bsky also had a bunch of marginalised people - including trans people - as early adopters that helped shape their views on moderation.
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.
People want a 100%, 1:1, perfect clone of immediate pre-Musk Twitter. They want Twitter without Musk.
Bluesky is a 100%, 1:1, perfect clone of immediate pre-Musk Twitter. It is Twitter without Musk.
It looks exactly like Twitter, it feels exactly like Twitter (both the Web interface and the official app), and it’s for tech-illiterate dumb-dumbs.
Only recently has an instance selector been added to the sign-up process of the official app, but Bluesky still markets itself to its users as the self-same kind of centralised monolithic silo as Twitter and Facebook.
Mastodon has a vastly different UI and UX from immediate pre-Musk Twitter, but people don’t want to learn anything new. And truth be told, I’ve read from Misskey/Forkey users that Misskey and the Forkeys actually have an easier-to-use Web UI than Mastodon.
Also, Mastodon advertises the fact that it’s decentralised with lots of instances to choose from, even though the gGmbH would rather want everyone to be on mastodon.social. This freaks people out.
Joining Mastodon is actually no more difficult than joining Bluesky in practice because the official app railroads everyone to mastodon.social without forcing them. But people won’t know until they’ve actually installed and opened that app.
The only reason why Mastodon grew so quickly to such an enormous size in late 2022 was because it was the only alternative to Twitter that anyone knew, including those who pulled Twitter users onto Mastodon. The only other advantage it had over anything else was that, unlike Twitter, it didn’t have Musk and uncontained droves of Nazis. Had people been sent to Akkoma or Calckey instead of Mastodon, it would have exploded the same.
Inb4 “How can people use e-mail then?” That’s because everyone’s on Gmail, and many think e-mail is a proprietary Google product.
Well lots of offoces used Microsoft for email and out sode i workd email is password reset, receipts, and new account confirmation. When the last i sent and email that wasn’t work or those things? About 8 years ago.
But yes tryings to explain instance and federation to a regular user is only going to confuse them. We need mastodon to be a sample as login and use. If we bring up a single tecnical term we lose people.
Because they liked Twitter, and Bluesky is (presumably) like Twitter before Elmo bought it.
To paraphrase my opinion from back then:
- Easier onboarding, and a familiar, easier UX
- customizable feeds you can subscribe to + starterpacks instantly give you full timelines and people to follow (and followers, if you’re in many starter packs)
- better discoverability, and therefore higher engagement
- stacking moderation and excellent security features (e.g. detachable quote boosts, “the nuclear block”)
- many users who tried Mastodon first had bad experiences with “HOA”-like behavior and over-enthusiastic mods
What is HOA?
Home Owners Association a group or people that “polices” neighbors and has a hisyory of doing shady things. But he’s referring to the actitude of “coming outta nowhere to tell you what to do” they have in common.
What S_H_K said, people have reported being rebuked for posting pictures without ALT-text and not CW-ing uncommon things like eye-contact or food, for example. One person notably received angry messages for posting about cutting their finger on a sheet of paper without CW. The worst accounts were of POC talking about racism they experienced and being told to put it under CW.
Personally, I’m excited there’s a decentralized option that’s super popular. Yes, relatively very few run their own PDS, but if the main bsky instance becomes a problem for anyone, people can easily migrate.
It’s not just data ownership either; The AT protocol supports community-built algorithms, relays, and app views.
I wouldn’t say it’s truly decentralised in its current state.
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.
Because centralized services are easier to use.
This exactly. I didn’t join Lemmy for a long time, because I would search for “Lemmy”, get confused when I see a page asking me to “pick an instance” instead of seeing a front page, and then leave because I thought that they were all independent from each other.
It wasn’t until reddit killed my favorite app that I finally decided to put in the effort to figure it out.
I’m running my own PDS on the AT Protocol 🤷♂️
I’m sure a certain percentage of people can’t spell mastodon.
Because it pretends to be different to the centralised corporate social media platforms, whilst giving the cohesive experience of a centralised platform
Best answer yet IMO. The cohesive experience is essential to the branding, and low threshold for entry.
The people leaving Twitter right now want Twitter minus Elon. That’s Bluesky. They’ve heard a couple of their Twitter follows mention it and they’ve gone to their app store where they find an app called Bluesky, install it and easily join and start using it. Once they do they are finding it pretty straightforward to find people they used to follow on Twitter.
That’s all people want.
I’ve got an idea as to why.
I went to mastodon.social and see a Linux meme, some heavy political commentary, and a bunch of posts about mastodon being better than Twitter.
I then went to bluesky.app and see some political riffing, cute animals, a comic, some jokes, a company, and even Don Lemon.
The average person checking them both out for the first time, mastodon is nerd shit and Bluesky is normal shit.
I’ve tried to stick with mastodon for a while and after using it for months, your description of checking it out is STILL what my feeds look like. That’s all there seems to be on Mastodon.
Feels like deciding in 2010 between Twitter and Reddit in some ways…
