Ask HN: Has Mastodon Failed? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Has Mastodon Failed?

12 pointscolesantiago8 comments

I read this blogpost about Mastodon's new onboarding experience and was shocked that Mastodon's app is deliberately pushing new users to mastodon.social as the default server.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/05/a-new-onboarding-experience-on-mastodon/

I thought the whole point of Mastodon is to be a federated social network where the first choice is to choose their instance, so why has Mastodon's app chosen mastodon.social as the default instance to centralise new users on one server instead of encouraging federation?

Did Mastodon recognise that BlueSky and others are gaining rapid traction due to Mastodon being extremely hard to onboard new users? BlueSky may have an invite system now, but even then, I can't imagine the massive adoption it would get when the invite system gets lifted.

Mastodon's new change was probably too late and may have severely dented it's aims to become mainstream and friendly towards non-technical folks. It looks like they swayed against its federated principles and now has taken the route to select a default instance for users to make mastodon.social even more centralised and less federated.

I have long thought they missed their moment, but not because of this.

the whole point of Mastodon is to be a federated social network where the first choice is to choose their instance

Yes, but only nerds care about federation. consumers just want a simple straightforward onboarding experience that makes it super-easy to find, follow, and chat with their friends. If you are an inexperienced consumer just looking for a nice social media experience, how are you supposed to know what instance to choose? In a few cases it might be very obvious, eg if you love sportsball then sportsball.social is probably for you and so on. But in many cases it's not obvious, and it's even less obvious how to figure out which instances federate with which other ones and what that means for your ability to link up with other people.

Nerds need to understand that 99.995% of people do not give a shit about protocols or architectures - they just want to know does it cost money, is there an app for their phone, is it easy to use. I have 30 years of experience with distributed online communities and even I don't give a shit about federation on an emotional level.

It's clever, it's a great idea, but emotionally I don't care, in much the same way that I don't care about the fact that HN runs on ARC and so on. Where and how people hang out socially is primarily an emotional decision, both online and off. Nobody is invested in the mechanics of the social media platform unless they harbor a desire to run their own instance, which most people don't. You don't pick a bar or social club because you like their business model, you pick it because you like the atmosphere and/or because your friends already hang out there.

Fully agree. I like the concept, but the concept itself produces multiple instances of any particular subject. You have to wade through a plethora of almost the same instances and then read the moderation policy on each to find out is this is the one for you, then you have to somehow tell your friends.

I think you’re being a little hyperbolic. The facts are that there’s a handful of popular servers that are easy to find, a few that seem popular in certain countries. This is all very very like email, which people don’t have trouble understanding the mental model of. And furthermore, all those popular instances federate with each other, also like email. (I assume there are a handful of politically-fringe servers which don’t federate with the mainstream, which is also not that different than email, where the few services most everyone uses won’t accept mail from any IP without an established good reputation.) this means users don’t really have to ask any questions about who federates with whom. And it doesn’t matter which instance you join so there’s no risk to picking the wrong one. Me, I picked one with a short name for ease of typing, and also picked one where I could get my 3-letter username. (Another thing that sucks about a single namespace: there’s one single “SJP” or “GOB” in the whole world with Twitter.)

So I’m saying that Mastodon’s elevator pitch is “It’s like Twitter but they have different servers, but you don’t really have to care about that because they’re all connected, like email.” That’s not on par with compiling your own Linux kernel like you’re making it out to be.

It seems like there's a thread every week now declaring Mastodon dead. No, it isn't dead. Stop trying to make Mastodon being dead happen, Hacker News.

Mastodon doesn't need to be mainstream, and it's already friendly enough towards non-technical folks (since I've seen plenty of them move from Twitter,) and even if it isn't, that's still OK. Let it be niche. Leave it alone. Stick to BlueSky or whatever the current fad "Twitter killer" startup that wants to bleed you try is.

Pushing people to mastodon.social initially is probably not a bad idea. Most people won't even care, and they can still follow people from other servers. It's fine.

I have a somewhat popular toot: https://tech.lgbt/@Kye/109982031390613361

10k monthly active users: "Mastodon is dead!"

100k monthly active users: "Mastodon is dead!"

1,000k monthly active users: "Mastodon is dead!"

1,300k monthly active users: "Mastodon is dead!"

I'm starting to think these people aren't real doctors.

I thought of Mastodon as more of a protocol than a single entity, so I didn’t even realize there was a “Mastodon” entity or “Mastodon’s app.”

But even though I was technically wrong, I’ll continue to not care what this “Mastodon” entity does as long as they leave me alone, which they have to, since they don’t control the instance I use, nor the app that I use (Ivory)

> I didn’t even realize there was a “Mastodon” entity or “Mastodon’s app.”

There isn't, really. There's an official "Mastodon" instance and accompanying app (that supports other instances), both made by the Mastodon lead developer. OP seems to be going hyperbolic over them recommending the lead developer's instance when you're onboarding. Not really the end of the world, but as a non-Twitter user I'm willing to believe I'm missing something too.

Fear not, though. Mastodon is still Open Source, ActivityPub is still alive, and the lead dev seems to mostly care about catering to Mastodon users rather than Twitter ones.

If it has, I haven't noticed. There's plenty of content to read through and the circles I'm interested in are plenty active.

Has it replaced Twitter? No. Nobody is going to do that until they get Kanye, Elon and Trump in one online room together, and good luck with that. I'm content eating my ActivityPub and RSS bran flakes as long as I'm not exposed to ads or personality cults.

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