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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

#151

Post by nsxwolf »

VectorLock wrote: post #133
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, it sounds like you want Mastodon to be twitter. Or think that it should be trying to be? They have a blog & followers and some nomenclature in common. But they're really not that similar at all. If they weren't using @ notation and "followers" etc people would complain it's too different. But because they're using those things, people also complain that it's not similar enough. Tough situation. It's just best t…

Have you looked at Mastodon? Have you not noticed they're called "Toots?"

If that is what posts are called on that platform I will not use that platform.

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

#152

Post by cmrdporcupine »

nsxwolf wrote: post #151
VectorLock wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you looked at Mastodon? Have you not noticed they're called "Toots?"

If that is what posts are called on that platform I will not use that platform.

You can call them whatever you want. Most people just say posts. The default mastodon server whimsically says "Toot!" in the button. But, like... run your own server and change it :-)

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

#153

Post by Spivak »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #40
Spivak wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it’s a microblogging platform.

Does a platform of mostly invite only communities count as microblogging? Is Facebook a microblogging platform too?

Servers bring invite only is like when Hey was invite only. It doesn’t mean you can only talk to other Hey users it just means being hosted by them is exclusive. The only thing you miss out on is the feed of what people on your server are posting -- maybe that's not a problem or maybe that's the raison d'être.

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

#154

Post by Kadin »

mempko wrote: post #55
ilyt wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Ok, what about Google+?

Google bungled the G+ rollout quite badly.

They seemed to forget that the thing that made Facebook gain traction initially was a very gradual rollout targeting affinity groups (colleges and college students) at first, with quasi-private networks, before they opened it up to everyone.

Google did the invite-only thing for a while but then IMO tried to grow too quickly too fast, and it felt like a Potemkin village situation.

My feeling is that if you want to launch a social network, you need to concentrate on an actual existing social group and get substantial penetration into that group, then slowly branch out. Trying to get anyone and everyone to sign up from the beginning is almost guaranteed failure, or at least a very hard uphill battle with trying to please everyone at once.

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

#155

Post by linsomniac »

I've been pondering: If 1% of Twitter users move to Mastodon, can it even handle it? 1% is ~4.5M users, currently the entire Fediverse is around 5.5M users, so that'd be nearly doubling. In looking at the server lists when I tried to sign up, many of them were closed for invites and mastodon.social where I had previously signed up wouldn't load the homepage.

Sounds like the mastodon.social admin is ordering new hardware. The article mentions an admin of 80K users spending 300+euro/mo, extrapolate that out to 4.5m users and that's 17Keuro.

Not trying to FUD here, just thinking about what it would take to get Mastodon to take over.

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

#156

Post by aikendrum »

candiddevmike wrote: post #13
cloutchaser wrote: post #2

How many conservatives are still on Twitter complaining about censorship, rather than using Gettr or Parler or Truth Social? Network effects are WAY stronger than we think. Also, if you built a following on Twitter over 10-15 years, leaving it is a massive sacrifice. I wouldn't bet on an actual twitter exodus.

I feel like if people truly cared about what you had to say they would seek you out regardless of the platform. Follower numbers are glorified internet points meant to keep you engaged/chained to the platform.

There are countless people who I couldn't enumerate who I might be potentially interested. I don't want them 'recommended' or algorithmically forced on me, but retweets and quote tweets have effectively surfaced their work over time. I absolutely don't want to have to do that again and again across social network. Twitter 'mutuals' aren't like facebook friends. They're a two way asynchronous conversation with a pool of people with varying relationships of wildly different kinds. Many of whom are pseudonymous.

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

#157

Post by cmrdporcupine »

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…

Who is advertising it as a twitter replacement? Maybe some twitter users are desperate for that, but that's not how I have seen it proposed in the past. It's a microblogging social network, yes. But explicitly federated.

In any case, there's no single "Mastodon" entity that does any advertising.

It's just the WWW.

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

#158

Post by VectorLock »

mikro2nd wrote: post #128
VectorLock wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Block each of a million individual spam bots manually. I'll wait. The obvious retort is "I just block everything by default." You have now closed yourself off and the spambots have won.

On Mastodon there's a setting "Require follow requests : Manually control who can follow you by approving follow requests" so you get to whitelist Real People. Not as onerous as you suggest.

Block each of a million individual spam bots manually. I'll wait.

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

#159

Post by Kadin »

VectorLock wrote: post #111
_chu1 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Bad" actors don't need to be dealt with, just block them. Content creators get discovered just like on Twitter, a link.

Block each of a million individual spam bots manually. I'll wait. The obvious retort is "I just block everything by default." You have now closed yourself off and the spambots have won.

No, the idea is that you block entire instances where the admins are lax about allowing spam or bot accounts.

If you run an instance and don't do active moderation and just let any putz sign up and post crap, you'll end up getting de-federated and your real users will probably leave (Masto makes it easy to migrate your stuff from one account to another).

This is one of the reasons why having lots of instances is a good thing, and one of the risks of Mastodon's federated structure is having a lot of users sign up to one or two big generic instances.

I'm hoping that more sites that have existing user communities will start offering Mastodon instances for their already-vetted users. The instance I use (SDF.org) is largely but not exclusively for existing SDF members, and this seems to work quite well. I don't know how the mainline Mastodon server's authentication system works, but hopefully it's reasonably straightforward to plug into an already-existing user database for auth purposes.

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

#160

Post by VectorLock »

Kadin wrote: post #146
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…

Twitter didn't really have much of a discovery mechanism in its early years, and that's when it really built the userbase that is its main competitive advantage right now. I'm not sure that's a huge impediment, particularly since Twitter could be the de facto discovery mechanism for people on their way out the door ("Hey, I'm leaving for Mastodon, where I'll be foo@bar.org"). I do think there's an unmet demand for ag…

The experience with twitodon.com is very clunky. Since people seem to be putting their mastodon tags in their Twitter "name" fields now it seems like it'd be a much more streamlined process to just scrape that.
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