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Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

theguardian.com

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Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#61

Post by ilyt »

capableweb wrote: post #25
MichaelZuo wrote: post #6

It's difficult to see the value in spending time on Mastodon, compared to other services. For example, just checking joinmastodon.org gives the following top 10 recommended options: " GENERAL INVITE ONLY snabelen.no Ein norsk tenar for den desentraliserte sosiale media platformen Mastodon Get on waitlist 1.8K GENERAL INVITE ONLY mastodontti.fi Tämä on suomenkielinen Mastodon-instanssi. Julkisten päivitysten tulisi ol…

Different between Mastodon and the other platforms you linked is that Mastodon facilitates communication between the various instances (if they agree to that). So you can join instance X and still communicate with people on instance Y, and it's easy for the administrators to set that up. It's possible with IRC/Discord as well but it's hacky and requires "bridges" while that functionality is "native" in Mastodon.

Right but the users on discord can chat with eachother just fine, while in case of Mastodon if 2 server admins don't like eachother no dice ? Or I'm understanding how it works wrong ?

It seems counter-intuitive to moderate based on "which server user is from" too.

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#62

Post by kibwen »

philipov wrote: post #53
kibwen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a mistake to think that Mastodon would necessarily be the beneficiary of any Twitter exodus. I think it's more likely that the beneficiaries would be established, centralized services like Discord or Reddit. The underlying media models may be different, but I suspect people care less about the model than about seeing things they're interested in, and plenty of these people will already have accounts on t…

People aren't looking for Reddit or Discord. They already have these. The people using Twitter to promote their business-of-choice are already on Reddit and Discord if they want to be. They don't want Twitter because it's a good way to host their communities, they want Twitter for cross-promoting their community to other communities.

We're both necessarily speculating here, so I'll counter by suggesting that an enormous proportion of Twitter users don't actually care whether or not they're using Twitter, they just care that the content they want to consume and the people they want to follow are on Twitter. They can't be "using Reddit or Discord if they want to be", because that's not where the community already is. Solving the collective action problem to overcome this inertia is hard, but easier in tumultuous times like these.

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#63

Post by piuvas »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #24
piuvas wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're forgetting that Mastodon runs on ActivityPub, which means that the point is to divide users into different servers. For example, when everyone joined mastodon.social, the balance tipped and a lot of users lost access. Concentrating users into a single instance is not what's supposed to happen. Ideally, you wouldn't want to go through joinmastodon.org and join the highest ranking server since that would central…

So if it serves a different use case then Twitter, why is it even advertised, or talked about, as a replacement?

It's not very different. The hardest thing to grasp is the decentralization.

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#64

Post by beanjuiceII »

70k users doesn't seem like that many...and I am not sure I'd call them "users" yet, technically I'm a "user" but I checked it out for a few months here and there and don't plan on ever going back. The entire experience felt really clunky to me and moving the pin seems like a tough pull that would take quite awhile. but you know just my opinion!

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#66

Post by UncleMeat »

kibwen wrote: post #29
tptacek wrote: post #10

That's 0.003% of Twitter's "monetizable" daily active users.

Rather than counting users, I'll be more interested to see if any specific communities actually manage to collectively transition to another service. It's not 2006 anymore, nobody makes an account on Twitter because they want to "microblog" about the sandwich they had for lunch; no, you make an account on Twitter because, say, you're a ML researcher and all the prominent ML researchers are talking on Twitter. If the…

I suspect that this framing will make the number feel even worse. The number of complete (or even majority) communities that this 70k number represents is surely very nearly zero.

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#67

Post by cmrdporcupine »

kingkawn wrote: post #23

I joined mastodon. Every instance I joined was full of posts about how good mastodon is, but there was no other content or conversations. I quit mastodon.

Not my experience, because I went and looked for interesting people and followed them. Through hash tags and looking at what other interesting people were 'boosting', etc.

Honestly, it's up to you to go find interesting people and follow them. There's no engagement "algorithm" like Twitter. That's a good thing, but yes, it does require an initial time investment.

It's not a twitter replacement. I never had twitter in my life -- on purpose -- so that's not how I think of it. It's more like FidoNET or Usenet of old. Which is fine with me.

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#68

Post by MichaelZuo »

Krisando wrote: post #36
rsynnott wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So it's a bit weird why it's advertised as a Twitter replacement at all. Clearly competition will balkanize everything into thousands of mostly invite-only niche servers. That doesn't _really_ matter, though; Mastodon sites largely interconnect. I'm on mastodon.social because I am very lazy; most of the people I follow are on other, more specialised sites.

> That doesn't _really_ matter, though; Mastodon sites largely interconnect. I'm on mastodon.social because I am very lazy Mastodon is a mess. Pawoo.net is the LARGEST userbase Mastodon node, professionally ran by a company and is one of the few that can scale appropriately to demand. You'll find that mastodon.social has limited its federation abilities with it. Your choice of Mastodon nodes matter.

So it's not even decentralized but centralized into multiple competing blocs?

That just sounds like the worst of both worlds.

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#69

Post by Krisando »

capableweb wrote: post #25
MichaelZuo wrote: post #6

It's difficult to see the value in spending time on Mastodon, compared to other services. For example, just checking joinmastodon.org gives the following top 10 recommended options: " GENERAL INVITE ONLY snabelen.no Ein norsk tenar for den desentraliserte sosiale media platformen Mastodon Get on waitlist 1.8K GENERAL INVITE ONLY mastodontti.fi Tämä on suomenkielinen Mastodon-instanssi. Julkisten päivitysten tulisi ol…

Different between Mastodon and the other platforms you linked is that Mastodon facilitates communication between the various instances (if they agree to that). So you can join instance X and still communicate with people on instance Y, and it's easy for the administrators to set that up. It's possible with IRC/Discord as well but it's hacky and requires "bridges" while that functionality is "native" in Mastodon.

As someone with seven Mastodon accounts. I know from experience that it's so easy to choose the wrong node and find out it's not being federated with on other Mastodon nodes. Worst part is even when you run your own Mastodon node, there are some nodes that operate instead in a whitelist mode, so you still lose out.

Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover

#70

Post by ceejayoz »

stewbrew wrote: post #46
VectorLock wrote: post #26

People used to think the network effect for MySpace and Friendster were insurmountable. I played around with Mastodon last night and I think it has some bad but not insurmountable ergonomic wrinkles, but I worry its decentralization will prevent it from ever becoming mainstream. Centralization makes it easier to deal with "bad" actors. Also Discovery is a huge problem: how do I discover people I know? How do content…

I don't think these are just ergonomic wrinkles. I was surprised to learn that it seems to matter which instance you join. I assumed "decentralized" means "it doesn't matter where you're located". To me this is rather a basic, philosophical flaw. I would also expect a decentralized network to easily support multiple identities. At least the default client seemingly does not. Twitter on the other hand allows switching…

> I would also expect a decentralized network to easily support multiple identities. At least the default client seemingly does not.

The official iOS client certainly does. Long press on the profile icon at the bottom right to switch/add.

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