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Mastodon still can’t replace Twitter

fastcompanyme.com

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Re: Mastodon still can’t replace Twitter

#11

Post by betwixthewires »

So I get the whole point of the article, I get the criticisms, and I get that nobody but the most technical minded, kool aid drinking fans of the technology care about what I'm going to say.

Most of the problems listed are UI problems. You can use any client you want.

A few shortcomings of all current clients, particularly application clients (not web clients) are the inability to merge timelines, the inability to create custom timelines, the inability to follow instances and the inability to remote follow (client only follow, your account isn't actually following). These are all things technically possible that expand the usability of the software but nobody seems to implement it.

Beyond that, there's more than just mastodon there.

And the network can replace twitter. And it will, either it or something like it. Twitter is a company, it has to show revenue to investors, which means it has a limited lifespan hardcoded in. It has to change things, which always means alienating users. An open network like activitypub on the other hand, can function just fine with 2 users for a hundred years before people start using it. It doesn't have to have growth, which means it can continue on indefinitely. Nobody has to change anything, but you can if you want. Open tools will, in all cases, supplant the corporate offerings they compete with given enough time.

Re: Mastodon still can’t replace Twitter

#12

Post by betwixthewires »

rvz wrote: post #2

And it is not early days anymore. We have given it enough time to realize the claims as a Twitter alternative and it has simply failed. Twitter had tens of millions of users in its first 6 years. Mastodon is still struggling and considers 20 people as 'trending' . Mastodon is a total failure, and virtually no-one is there or uses it frequently or daily other than the general hyper tech-crowd and that is the fact. Reg…

It's not a failure. This idea that it has to be huge to be a success comes from the instagram, Facebook, twitter and YouTube way of counting success. 100 million views, 10k likes in an hour, 100k followers... these humongous numbers are not normal, and they're not necessary for a rewarding social experience online. In fact I think the opposite is true.

Lots of people use the network daily. I do. It's more fun than twitter. You can experiment. You can say whatever you want if you pick the right servers. And you'll see people doing that, and saying things you don't like. And thats fine.

I'll never use big corporate social media again in any form.

Re: Mastodon still can’t replace Twitter

#13

Post by culi »

TylerE wrote: post #8
lioeters wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because you are not there, doesn't mean other people are not. > My conservative estimate of current Mastodon network totals, based on my own stats aggregation, is 3 million registered users and 250k monthly active users. > - Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko (April 2022)

That sounds pretty dismal? E.g. >90% of "registered users" don't actually use the platform.

Do you think Twitter or Facebook is any better?

Re: Mastodon still can’t replace Twitter

#16

Post by TylerE »

culi wrote: post #13
TylerE wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds pretty dismal? E.g. >90% of "registered users" don't actually use the platform.

Do you think Twitter or Facebook is any better?

Yes? Facebook's MAU is almost half the world population. Hell, their daily active users is almost 2B.

Re: Mastodon still can’t replace Twitter

#17

Post by colesantiago »

It's sad that TruthSocial and some right wing instances in the past (like Gab once was) was one of the biggest Mastodon instances, this cements the main Mastodon instance as a very niche social network which the mainstream will never use.

I don't think Mastodon can ever recover from this even with the so called 'migration' that happened because of Elon buying Twitter, I don't think that caught on to shift anything, probably only a small fraction of techies use the main Mastodon instance and that is pretty much it.

TruthSocial makes this even worse.

Re: Mastodon still can’t replace Twitter

#18

Post by kixiQu »

> a combination of Twitter’s chronological feed with the community-driven spaces of Reddit

Eugen's product vision is fighting the "community-driven spaces" idea as hard as he can, as far as I understand – to the extent that that maps onto instances, and not the [groups that don't yet exist].

> But because each server effectively acts as a separate version of Mastodon, participating in multiple instances is a hassle. For each one, you must maintain separate profiles and follower lists, and there’s no way to view multiple “Local” timelines in a single feed.

I agree that it'd be nice to be able to view other instances' local timelines. But from here on out, the piece gets real confused by its idea that this is the only way to use Mastodon and thus that you should have one account per instance – this is not how most people use Mastodon.

> The mobile app isn’t really set up for hopping between instances, either. If you get bored with once instance and decide you’d like to check out another, the only option is to sign out of your account and sign up for a new instance from scratch.

So... log on to your desktop and [move].

> The overarching issue here is that Mastodon is trying to be too much like Twitter when it really ought to be more like Reddit.

If you want ActivityPub Reddit, you want [Lemmy], but with less FOSSy users.

> In the ideal version of Mastodon, users would be able to browse the content of those communities, and jump between them at any time, but would still have easy ways to interact with anyone else on the network.

This... is what I do. This is how I use Mastodon. This exists???

[groups that don't yet exist]: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/861#issuecomment...

[move]: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#move

[Lemmy]: https://lemmy.ml/

Re: Mastodon still can’t replace Twitter

#20

Post by Alekhine »

kixiQu wrote: post #18

> a combination of Twitter’s chronological feed with the community-driven spaces of Reddit Eugen's product vision is fighting the "community-driven spaces" idea as hard as he can, as far as I understand – to the extent that that maps onto instances, and not the [groups that don't yet exist]. > But because each server effectively acts as a separate version of Mastodon, participating in multiple instances is a hassle.…

> This... is what I do

How do you do that? When I used Mastodon, I could only see my own instance's local timeline and the federated timeline. Basically, how do I Mastodon?

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