Twitter might MySpace? That's terrible.... Next!
Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
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Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#10270k 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!
70k! whoua, twitter is in trouble. It might be a good rise for Mastodon, but the fact is that 70k user-ish is nothing in social-media-scale.
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#103People 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…
> People used to think the network effect for MySpace and Friendster were insurmountable. That was also long time ago and it was much easier to compete back then. I think now only way for that to happen is if big network fucks up, not if the better competition comes up
It could be that you are watching a big network fuck up in real time.
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 p…
I wouldn't be surprised if some huge percentage of Twitter "users" are people following random links that friends/groups link to them. They'll just as easily follow links to various other services.
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You should think of it more as multiple places joined together rather than as one place spread out. It's more like the old BBS networks of old, like FidoNET, etc. And it has a similar vibe to that. I like it for this reason. If you go in expecting Twitter, you will be disappointed. That's not what it is.
FidoNET (got I loved FidoNET) had a central coordinating authority, you had to get on a nodelist.
With Mastodon it gets incrementally harder to just add someone. Are they on the same Mastodon instance as me? Does my Mastodon instance federate the Mastodon instance they're on? Is this handled client side with multiple identities? Now how do I handle these multiple identities, so I broadcast "toots" (cringe) to all of them?
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#106I got a mastodon account on the mastodon.social instance years ago and took another look recently. I still can't figure it out. I see people say they're moving to mastodon, try to search for them on the platform, and find nothing. Possibly they're on another instance that's not searchable from mastodon.social, or their name is different, or the search is bad... But the end result is I can't find anybody there.
This was my experience also. The 'migration' tools are very poor.
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#107People 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 agree, discovery was my biggest problem for a long time with Mastodon.
Fortunately, most of the recent Twitter emigrés have been doing #introduction posts with tags about their interests, which makes them easy to find. Via the internal search, and with sites like https://fediverse.info/explore/people if they register for it.
And people have also been sharing services like
* https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ and https://twitodon.com/ to find people you were following on Twitter, and
* https://fedi.directory/ and https://communitywiki.org/trunk which have users categorized by interests and what they usually post. Just randomly clicking around these exposed me to new areas of interests (eg. generative art) that I had no clue existed on Mastodon. These follows then serve as your gateway into discovering more users, via their boosts (retweets in Twitter parlance).
My timeline is a lot richer than it was even a couple days ago, and it seems this trend of creating external tools to solve Fediverse-wide issues is growing and catching momentum. Which was sorely needed, as it means you don't have to depend on the Mastodon project or instance admins dedicating even more of their time. Instead, the problem gets solved through collaborative effort, as it's meant to be.
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#108People 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…
It doesn't need to be mainstream, nor do I want to be mainstream. I just use it to follow a number of interesting people and to write my thoughts here and there. A bit like how Twitter was in its early days. (Except without the stupid short word limits which encouraged pithy one liners.) I don't need it to have celebrities or big media organizations. That is literally the worst part of Twitter. I don't need my mom on…
Sounds like you're happy with a vBulletin / blog experience.
Mastodon wants to be Twitter, or at least really tries to ape Twitter.
Some people like the big commons experience of Twitter and would like to see that somewhere else.
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
That makes Mastodon more of an attractive alternative to Discord rather than a replacement of the "digital commons" aspect of Twitter. But as some people have stated, maybe Mastodon doesn't want to _be_ that, but some people hope that there can be something that can assume that mantle.
What if the only thing that exists that can do that is (gag) Facebook?
I think the thing that helped Facebook grow and survive (as long as it did) in this way was its focus on real identities.
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#110To those who say Twitter has such expansive network effects it can't be replaced AOL was replaced Twitter is AOL QED
All those cases are replacement via competitor.
This seems like a completely different case unless the Leftists execute what they told the Right-leaning users all these years: "just build your own Twitter".