I use mastodon and like it. Other than HN (which I also count as a "social platform"), it's the only social platform I use. It is also decentralized. However, I have not found that it works particularly well as a decentralized social platform. 100% of the people I follow and the people who follow me are on the mastodon instance I'm on. I've actually made efforts to branch out, but I find it impossible. The network effect means that the whole of the external feed is full of stuff I'm completely uninterested in and there are no tools (that I know of) to whittle it down. For me this is a significant hurdle that stands in the way of them realizing their goals.
For social things, decentralization is always going to be a non-starter. I'm never going to be able to convince most of my friends to choose Mastodon over Twitter.
Mastodon does okay. It's not as big as Twitter, but people who stick with it are happy with what they have. All it did was flip the model: interconnected, community-funded instances instead of one big, expensive to run silo.
Yeah it’s funny because decentralized networks like Mastodon are addressing this need to be decentralized because otherwise you have these conglomerate social networks with too much power. If communities didn’t feel the need to all be on one platform like Twitter, Reddit, etc then something like Mastadon seems overkill. So really this seems like a problem of our doing
Interesting, I hadn’t heard of that - sounds quite similar to Mastodon? I wish they weren’t social networks based around identities, friends and sequences of posts, though. I would much prefer sites and pages to be the primary thing. I don’t like the kind of content that social media encourages, even decentralised social media.
It's not about the platform, but the people. Mastodon is nice for some of the techy stuff I'm interested in. But it's useless for other things I used to follow on Twitter: hyper-local news and weather, sports banter, and other researchers in my field.
Twitter, for example, aimed to be a single, universal town square. Mastodon follows much closer to forums where you find yourself in smaller, potentially more tightknit communities
Both have pros and cons. I don't expect Mastodon will give people the same value as social media, but it won't have some of the downsides either. Similarly, I don't expect social media will ever be sustainable as a coordination platform without toxicity and doom scrolling.
The fact it's decentralized isn't the issue. Everything is decentralized if you look close enough. It's jure pure network effects. Twitter has like 20 competitors right now and none of them is outshining the rest, including Mastodon. This confuses people and makes them stay at Twitter.
If there was JUST Mastodon, and one decent client for each platform... well... there wouldn't be Twitter anymore.
Eh, that comes down to how you choose to use the platform.
Speaking for myself, early on I used the local and federated feeds to find interesting people to follow, but once my followed list was built up, I found I rarely spent time in those feeds.
Personally, I'd say if folks are using Mastodon in the way you're describing, they'd be better off using Lemmy or kbin, which are centered around communities containing topics, as then you can just follow those communities rather than following individual people.
That's the big issue with basically all decentralized services, they usually have some additional headache from the decentralized architecture but the actual benefits over a centralized service aren't relevant to even the average technical user. Mastodon didn't really take off until the moderation and social environment at Twitter got so twisted post Musk the benefit of being not Twitter was nearly enough to get people to switch. Even then the day to day of using Twitter may not have changed for most people, it hasn't that much for me but I have a pretty curated follow list.
Everything in this post is specific to you. Some people like to go to a social media site and have an algorithm spoon-feed them garbage. I'm someone that doesn't. Mastodon is way, way better for someone like me. And judging from my Mastodon timeline, it's working well for a lot of others too.
Let me suggest something crazy. Maybe a social network can exist and thrive even if there's another social network with more users.
Mastodon is growing on me. These big ol' VC driven social media giants are all overgrown and the cracks are showing. With mastodon, if one instance screws up, just go to another and still contact friends. I can even choose an instance with the economic and decision making model of my choosing, or run one myself and just engage with the federation on my own terms.
I really like your take and the one to which it responds. Mastodon is super neat and I'd love to see a broadly appealing open-source, non-commercial, decentralized social media network become dominant. However, the sharp decline in active users since the Twitter exodus supports what I've been saying for years: it is simply too much technical resistance for general social media audiences. I find it annoying and I used to enjoy dial-up BBSs.
It being such a centralized organization definitely gives me "oh boy, here we go again" feels but it's not like it's not like typical users are going to choose anything better. Eschewing this is the essence of the perfect killing the good.
You've inadvertently highlighted part of the appeal of Mastodon here. People using Mastodon are the ones who see problems with platforms like Twitter. People who use Mastodon are often attracted to it because they care about issues like centralization, that most people don't care about. This becomes a filter for the community of individuals who share some common ethos that's not present in mainstream communities.
Personally, my reasons for using Mastodon are purely ideological. Companies like Twitter and Facebook go against the very principles of having an open and distributed internet. They centralize power, and get to decide how people interact online. They also create walled gardens that make it difficult for users to move their data between. Each of these platforms locks the users in.
With ActivityPub federation, you can have many different platforms interacting with each other seamlessly. For example, Mastodon already federates with PeerTube, so you can post a video on PeerTube and have it show up in your Mastodon timeline. This is something that will never be possible between Twitter and YouTube since they're run by different companies that have no interest in letting their users communicate with each other.
I think whether Mastodon can succeed or not is past academic debate at this point. The community has over a million users now, and it's growing actively. Mastodon is very resilient by it's very nature of being open and distributed.
A company like Twitter needs to make money to stay afloat, if it doesn't grow then it will go under. This is not the case for Mastodon since it's largely an open source effort, and the core team needs relatively meager amount of money to stay afloat. Meanwhile, the distributed nature means that the cost of running Mastodon is distributed across the community. Instead of one company having to run servers that can support millions of users, you have lots of small instances that each support thousands of users and federate together.
You fundamentally approach social networks with a producer/consumer mindset. Which is great, for some social networks. Except consuming content isn't very social. People aren't friends with a performer on stage (I believe this relationship is derogatorily called "parasocial"). I like social networks that involve people I can viably interact with in a friendly way, not in a way that constantly requires them to perform for their audience. See popular twitter accounts complaining about reply guys or people trying to riff with them generally. There are plenty of these friendly interactions on mastodon, because you can literally have them with everybody! The platform doesn't suffer because self-styled creators don't use it!
> but understanding concerns of others (evidently) is not
Your concerns can be understood without being catered to. Not everything has to be fit for your purposes. The world keeps turning without your permission.
Look fundamentally this argument is pointless. If you like mastodon then use it; lots of people do, certainly enough to make it worthwhile, and arguing about whether it will fail is a pointless exercise in trying to predict the future. Whining about how it doesn't meet your standards doesn't matter. It isn't a product that a company loses out on profit by failing to sell to you. From our brief interaction here I can tell you the platform really isn't greatly diminished by your lack of presence.
I had your same idea about social media's. I never liked Mastodon, it's cheaply made and insecure. The decentralized part is interesting to me and I feel all social media should be made that way. The rules change all the time when it comes to government and some are for good measure, but it makes social media moderation very complicated to run. Companies get lazy and have lazy employee's. They hire Bots which isn't acceptable for some matters.
a social network whose branding is broken isn't a very good social network. i think that everytime i rediscover mastodon and realize that it's still not being used by anyone i consider interesting
Mastodon isn't a real social network though because they don't have seventeen layers of middle management and a C-suite raking in billions of dollars, so obviously this is a non-starter solution.
When I think of a social network, I think more Facebook and less Twitter. I want something similar to Facebook where I can view friends photos, see their profile/wall and join various forums/groups. Twitter/Mastodon is more a public square where everybody is talking thinking everybody else is listening to them.
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