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Mastodon still can’t replace Twitter

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Re: Mastodon still can’t replace Twitter

#21
post #16
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Facebook claims 700+ million login daily but many are bots.

It doesn't matter because you are not talking or interacting with them. You have a small list and unless you explore groups.

Most of the world uses google search outside of China. I don't feel connected to them and if the volume dropped to a few hundred people using google search it wouldn't affect my experience.

Facebook isn't a community site it is a social media with expectations that you consume more content than you contribute.

Re: Mastodon still can’t replace Twitter

#22
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 tw…

> It's not a failure

It is a failure.

Having 3 million registered users and only 192,000 using it every month in the end after 6 years is more than 90% of all users not using it. With those numbers, there is virtually no-one using the platform which explains why many continued to keep posting on Twitter, more than on Mastodon.

So it is still a massive and complete failure in almost every way.

[0] http://sp3r4z.fr/mastodon/accurate_user_count

Re: Mastodon still can’t replace Twitter

#23
It's largely replaced Twitter for talking to a lot of my friends. Which is the only reason I ever joined Twitter in the first place - all their Livejournals got replaced by these autoposts of cryptic fragments of conversations, and I reluctantly followed them to this annoying world of ultra-short posts that just kept getting shittier and shitter as Twitter kept on trying to make it profitable. And I can preemptively block entire instances full of chuds for myself and everyone else on the instance I run. It's great.

It's nice. It's kinda like the Internet used to be before Endless September started.

I do think it could be a lot better if Eugen would stop trying to make it so much Like Twitter, I upped the post length limit to ~7k and it's fucking wonderful. I can have conversations with my friends. In paragraphs.

Re: Mastodon still can’t replace Twitter

#24
post #8
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.

It's because it is dismal and Eugen is right as well and there is evidence supporting that [0] which it is still true to this day with the up-to-date instances that are active and with users who have logged in at least once over a week.

3,064,237 total registered Mastodon accounts and only 192,384 users using it. That is 7% of active users using the platform and 93% of everyone else not using it. There is virtually no one to talk to or interact with on the platform.

This is enough to tell us that Mastodon is indeed a failure and has not replaced Twitter after 6 years of marketing itself as a Twitter alternative.

[0] http://sp3r4z.fr/mastodon/accurate_user_count

Re: Mastodon still can’t replace Twitter

#25
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?

Follow people (including people from other instances) and then interact with them on your timeline just like you would with Twitter.

Re: Mastodon still can’t replace Twitter

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Follow people (including people from other instances) and then interact with them on your timeline just like you would with Twitter.

Yup, pretty much just this. I make lists of folks in certain groupings to be able to fake being able to see posts-from-the-subset-of-people-I-follow-from-yesterweb.social and similar (and hooo could this functionality use some ux polish), but mostly I'm looking at the feed of all people I follow.

Re: Mastodon still can’t replace Twitter

#27
post #24
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's because it is dismal and Eugen is right as well and there is evidence supporting that [0] which it is still true to this day with the up-to-date instances that are active and with users who have logged in at least once over a week. 3,064,237 total registered Mastodon accounts and only 192,384 users using it. That is 7% of active users using the platform and 93% of everyone else not using it. There is virtually n…

Having a low active user count doesn’t mean there’s no one to interact with. I use it sometimes, I see lots of interaction. It’s not a success as a business (which it’s not necessarily trying to be) but that doesn’t mean it’s not a thing (a protocol) that many people are regularly using.

Re: Mastodon still can’t replace Twitter

#28
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tw…

> It's not a failure It is a failure. Having 3 million registered users and only 192,000 using it every month in the end after 6 years is more than 90% of all users not using it. With those numbers, there is virtually no-one using the platform which explains why many continued to keep posting on Twitter, more than on Mastodon. So it is still a massive and complete failure in almost every way. [0] http://sp3r4z.fr/mas…

192,000 is not "virtually no one." There are a about dozen sovereign nations with fewer people.

Re: Mastodon still can’t replace Twitter

#29
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 tw…

The fact that multiple companies have those numbers indicates the numbers are in fact “normal”. What isn’t normal is continuing to insist that the typical person cares enough about the ideology that motivates projects like Mastodon in spite of the literally hundreds and thousands of failed projects indicating the contrary.

Re: Mastodon still can’t replace Twitter

#30
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…

My favorite part about Mastodon/The Fediverse is people like you think it is dead and hopeless and don't come there

It is dead. Even the users who 'moved' to Mastodon came back to Twitter again are still posting on Twitter. Why? Because there is no-one on Mastodon even after the Twitter 'exodus'.

We are talking 6 years and even less users using it. That sounds like a total failure on Mastodon's side to be a viable Twitter alternative.

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