i have a mastodon account but it’s completely useless for me.

the only thing i use twitter for is to follow updates and news from professional journalists and artists who are not on mastodon and likely will never be. if your job depends on twitter, switching to mastodon is not going to happen.

if i want to engage with random average people, i come here to lemmy.

I have a mastodon account, I still check it occasionally and I've tried making it work a year ago, being active on it and following either people or hashtags. I also tried other networks like bsky and cara, or mastodon through kbin integration. None of them really worked out.

I didn't have an issue with the technical side as much as with the community and its mentality. They all have this persecution complex where everyone is out to get them and destroy their way of living. They simultaneously claim it's better and more morally superior than twitter while also responding to any questions or feedback with "if you don't like it GTFO". Most of the posts I've seen on mastodon seemed masturbatory and/or talking about other social networks and why are they bad than why is mastodon actually good. In many ways it was more toxic and negative than my carefully curated twitter feed. There's also as much doom and gloom as on twitter, if not more, when it comes to politics (or at least, it's harder to hide it).

The content in general was bad and boring but I don't know if this is because of the type of people that are on it or just because the lack of algorithm means I will see any random person's ramblings next to the biggest breaking news that I'm actually interested in. There is a lack of innovation in this area and it makes discoverability and content curation terrible, I don't need an algorithm to read my mind but at the very least I wish it could separate trash from actual popular topics.

I found some interesting niches when it comes to FOSS developers and tech but I found next to no actual game devs, artists or content creators on it and even the usual "copy content from twitter" bots were unreliable and uncommon.

TL;DR Mastodon seems very very niche and is not currently viable as a general replacement for other social networks, and IMHO due to the community culture there it's never going to grow into anything else either.

While I agree with the article and a lot of comments, I am still active on my Mastodon account and I am enjoying it more than ever.

Disclaimer: I'm a white male westerner working in IT. 😉

A friend of mine works in linguistics and education. He was an avid Twitter user and has since migrated to Bluesky and Mastodon. He says, Mastodon is quite complex and clunky but on Bluesky there's not much happening in his bubble.

For me, the quality of the conversation and the regional character of my local instance is a big plus on Madison. On Lemmy, I read a lot on international and tech topics, but on Mastodon, the conversation is related more to my countries politics and my region.

So, maybe they lost a lot of users. But the 14% that stayed are a good start for quite a vivid community.

If anyone has questions on how to get something out of Mastodon, ask away or follow me here: mateng@nrw.social.

i wish Lemmy would embrace Mastodon and make it easy for Lemmy users to join that network

I tried to replace Twitter by Mastodon but, in the end, I just left Twitter and don’t use Mastodon at all. The main reason I think is because the « onboarding » is painful. I never succeeded to find interesting people to follow. I faced many ghost accounts from people posting once a month or stopped a few years ago.

If you don’t find people by yourself, no one is going to see your posts and so, you won’t be able to find new people to follow by posting.

I don’t like what Twitter became, but the base principle of the algorithm (before it became X with the paid subscriptions) was working great for me. I was constantly adding new people to the mix, and removing inactive ones every month.

If I struggled this much with Mastodon, I am not surprised many people create an account and leave a few days / weeks later.

Let's see:

Network effect hits Mastodon specially hard as it competes not just with Twitter, but also Threads and Bluesky. In those situations, a smaller userbase means that people will outright ignore you as an option.

The way that federation was implemented; as linearchaos mentioned in another thread, if you settle in a smaller instance (the "right" thing to do), you won't get "good collections of off node traffic". So it creates a situation where, if you know how federation works you'll avoid big instances, and worsen your own experience; and if you don't, well, Mastodon's big selling point goes down the drain.

Federation itself introduces a complexity cost. That's unavoidable and the benefits of federation outweigh the cost by far; however, the cost is concrete while the bigger benefit is far more abstract.

Branding issues. Other users already mentioned it, but you don't sell a novel tech named after an extinct animal.

And this is just conjecture from my part, but I think that microblogging is becoming less popular than it used to be; people who like short content would rather go watch a TikTok video, and people who want well-thought content already would rather read a "proper" blog instead.

On a lighter side: the very fact that we're using the ActivityPub now helps Mastodon, even if we're in different platforms (like Lemmy, MBin, PieFed, SubLinks). Due to how federation works, you're bound to see someone in Mastodon sharing content with those forums and vice versa; it could be a bit less clunky but it's still more content for both sides.

On the text: I think that the author reached the right conclusion through the wrong reasoning. The activity peaks don't matter that much, when there's a huge influx of users you're bound to see some leaving five minutes later. The reason why Mastodon is struggling is this:

Source of the data.

See those slopes down? They show that the stable userbase is shrinking. Even users engaged enough with the platform are slowly leaving, but newbies who could fill their place aren't popping up.

Definently had the feeling of walking into a gay bar and not knowing anyone, like the article says.

I thought it was pretty cool personally because I never interact with gay people (afaik) in real life. And we have computer tech as a common interest, that's why we are on mastadon... But for people who are not into tech, I guess it's not so much to talk about maybe.

because its name is Mastodon, something that when people google it pulls up a band.

Also because it's trying to be a hot fresh new thing but it's literally named after an animal that's extinct.

If it had a catchier and more unique name it probably would have caught on more.

I think because when it comes to Instagram or Twitter type social media more people probably use it only to follow accounts and have no interest in being involved in it. So closer to treating it like a rss reader than something like lemmy or reddit. And conversation feed sucks in general.

I use squawker for Twitter. Can't comment, like, sub, or whatever and account follows are just local feeds like Stealth for Reddit or NewPipe or Freetube. And that's all I need from it.

Mastodon is 10 years younger and has 0.24% of Twitter’s user-base.

They’re doing great!

There's just not many people on there. And I already never used Twitter except to read in-time updates from people and companies, so naturally with many of them being on Threads or Bluesky, that's where I'd go to get that information.

I mean it's just normal to have a "social" part to social media, no?

Honestly my biggest issue is getting randomly banned from trans spaces for expressing my own lived experience with surgery and how I view my own body and gender. They're so "inclusive" that they start excluding people that don't use their very specific language or share their beliefs exactly. They keep kicking people out then wondering where all the people went!

I never liked the microblog format so while I've had acouple masto accounts since 2016 I never used it. But i also never used twitter.

Drag simply thinks microblogging is boring. Nobody has anything interesting to say and nobody smelled drag's toots.