allegedly 1M users in 2018, and in april there were already 30k new users spiking after the first musk/twitter annoucement.
Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
181–190 of 276 posts
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#182Earlier 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 "advertised" as a replacement for Twitter; the word "Twitter" does not appear on the Mastodon homepage. It's talked about because at the moment there aren't many similar alternatives.
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
A small fraction of Twitter's users create most of the value of the Twitter network. Given that, I think the interesting question is what segment do those 70k fall into?
Considering you can have a not repost everything you tweet on Mastodon, it doesn't seem like all that much commitment to be in both places.
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Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#184Hmm, I wonder do they mean mastodon.social, or the whole network. I was trying to find network-wide stats and couldn't (it's a difficult problem, I suppose, in that it's not _really_ a single network).
It's barely responsive right now, presumably because it's getting hammered with traffic, but this site has some stats: https://the-federation.info/mastodon
It shows an increase in total users of more like 230k
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#185People 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's worth looking at why people who are already on Twitter don't want to use Mastodon/Fediverse. The last time this topic came up on Twitter with Musk's first proposal to buy Twitter, several concerns were raised (and well-liked by thousands of other users) in several threads I noticed:
* Migrating one's account and tweets to Mastodon
* Finding people on Mastodon
* General confusion about what federation is, or what it means
* Stories of people who once used a Mastodon belonging to a friend group, had a falling out with whoever happened to be running the server, and was kicked off/had their account deleted
* The fact that DMs aren't private, and can be read by an instance admin, or by the instance admin of the instance of the user you send them to. This particularly seemed to unnerve people because you're more likely to interact and know who the instance admin is than you are with Twitter support/SWEs.
* The difficulty of choosing an instance.
* The difficulty of avoiding certain people and certain content, usually spoken of in terms of principle: that is, abusive messages and content which admins must agree to filter, but some admins may not want to block that content, leaving the users on an instance known for harboring that kind of content
* On the flip side, rampant defederation and the formation of cliques which become increasingly isolated social bubbles.
* The name of the software and its default interface
* The names of various instances which range from the whimsical to the offensive (e.g. 'wolfgirl.engineering' to 'fuckonthefirst.date').
* GDPR concerns and personal data privacy concerns - how do I delete media and text that I've uploaded that's now been shared across multiple instances? How do instance owners cope with this under the law?
I've seen very, very few responses to any of these problems; some of them I object to myself, but it seems short-sighted to say that the only reason people aren't jumping ship is because of network effects and not genuine concerns with the technology and the community as it exists today.
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#186Earlier 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.
Folks on pawoo.net regularly post lolicon, so, yeah. Depending on your interpretation of your local laws, you might pretty much be obligated to defederate from that sort of thing.
I think focusing on what has the biggest userbase or can give you the most reach is kind of missing the point with regard to the Fediverse. Without investors or stock prices or the need to sell ads, a lot of the motivation behind that sort of thinking evaporates. If you're looking at Mastodon and thinking "this is worthless, I can't build my brand with this," good, you're right, it's built that way on purpose.
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#18770k 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!
True, "members" might be a more accurate term.
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
A big chunk of the $TSLAQ community moved to Discord, but the experience is very different. For context these are the people who took early bets against Tesla and have been calling out its unethical practices. A lot of people are understandably nervous about continuing that research on a platform owned by its CEO.
Different in a good or bad way?
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#189Honest question: Can someone who actually uses and gets value from Twit please explain the use case and value? I totally grok interest-based social, but I do not at all understand why I would want to put effort into figuring out personality-based social (beyond family/friends/blogs/etc) - particularly when posts are limited to bumper sticker lengths (unless they are just URLS to rich posts hosted elsewhere, but that'…
Think of it as a socially driven RSS feed. On the one hand I enjoy following e.g. Science magazine directly. But the social part is that I follow people who post things they find interesting and often I find those things interesting as well. It's not really a platform for discussion as much as sharing links to content.
Re: Mastodon gained 70k users after Musk’s Twitter takeover
#19070k 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!
A small fraction of Twitter's users create most of the value of the Twitter network. Given that, I think the interesting question is what segment do those 70k fall into?
Same with when GitHub annoys everyone and the folks pop up announcing their move to GitLab.
The segment that makes up the dramatic reaction is the same segment who can move without issue. No stars, no followers, no real reason to be there (specifically) if we're honest.
I think this is a mild marketing opportunity for Mastodon, a big old nothing for Twitter.