Imagine having to explain how to use a social network ‘correctly’ to attempt to convince users on other social networks to make the move.

> Xitter is a lonely place compared to Mastodon w/hashtags.

How many daily active users are on Mastodon compared to Twitter / X right now?

Does it? I have no idea who created Mastodon.

Well showing popular posts was just one example. I am just thinking of things that can be implemented on mastodon without a full rewrite to create an index.

> Most of the people I follow are people I don't know in real life who have less than a thousand followers but posts things I'm interested in, and I like how Twitter suggests new people to follow to me with similar characteristics.

Sure, that's cool. Thinking about this for a minute, I feel like your server could do some social graph analysis of your history of likes combined with who you follow and who they follow to suggest people to follow who meet the criteria: you do not follow them, but people whose posts you like do follow them.

I guess what I want to say is, I really feel like open social networks are an extremely important concept, and mastodon is the biggest one. Traction and networking effects are very important to make social networks survive. So rather than trying to build a full index on mastodon or build a new protocol that makes this easier, I really want to think about what is possible with mastodon today with simple changes. I believe that is a good path towards success.

Certainly twitter's fully closed system is not what I want to rest on in perpetuity.

I'm probably twiddling the wrong buttons or something but whenever I've clicked on a Fediverse hashtag, it's always just been the hashtag on the originating server. Is there a way to get a wider view that I've missed?

This is the wrong question to ask. Last I used Twitter it bombarded me with unsolicited, unrelated content to an inescapable degree. On Mastodon, which so enthusiastically compensates for Twitter’s aggression that no new content is surfaced without an explicit request or first-degree vouch, I take a peek at instances' local timelines almost daily.

Beyond the timeline, consider the behavior of hashtags. On a single-user instance hashtags are useless for discovery.

Which is an interesting point to make because that's exactly the experience I'm finding with Mastodon, having joined a community-specific instance (metalhead.club) which gives me that feeling of being in a community, but having some access to users from other communities via following interesting people. That last thing is the key difference with Mastodon - discovery is different. There's no algorithm pushing things into your feed - you need to be much more active in your own content discovery.

Until this is integrated into Mastodon by default - or any other new social network - its success will be limited to a niche at best. The only reason Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and the rest have been able to retain users is because of the algorithms which surface engaging content that keeps users coming back for more. (Sadly for society, the most "engaging" is usually the most polemic or inflammatory possible, which bad actors have abused successfully with tragic results for all of us.)

Let me back up this statement with simple math:

If you follow 100 accounts (not a crazy amount) and they post an average of 5 times a day (some more, some less), that's 500 posts a day to process. Assuming 16 waking hours a day, that's a tweet every 2 minutes. The more people you follow, the crazier the numbers get.

Over a decade ago when I still used Twitter and its API still functioned, I pulled my personal feed into a custom database, and then added my own web UI on top of it so I could try different ways of seeing all the posts from accounts I followed. I tried grouping by user, time, topic, custom ordering, filtering, formatting, etc. It turns out, it was impossible. No matter what I tried, the sheer quantity of posts means I'd miss a majority of them. At the time, I foolishly thought that this meant social media was just a fad that would soon go away - I didn't foresee the effect the discovery algorithms would have on their usage.

Mastodon doesn't have this functionality by default and because of the federated nature of the service, probably won't any time soon. So people join Mastodon, use it for a while before they reach a tipping point, get overwhelmed by toots, don't feel they're getting any decent response for their own posts, don't see anything instantly engaging at the top of their feed, and then slowly stop using it.

Have you tried to follow different people? Wouldn't that solve this issue since 100% of mastodon posts in your feed are people you follow (unlike on twitter that has ads and such).

I wouldn't say it hasn't caught on. There are nearly 1,200 federated Mastodon servers and nearly 800,000 users (source: https://instances.social/list/old), and my timelines are constantly full of new content.

For most people I know and follow, that's like, the low bar of twitter follower counts.

It turns out very bad takes, self-promotion, fake guruism and rage baiting mostly exist on social media because of the algorithms

Which is valid to be looked at as a feature rather than a deficiency.

> Mastodon missing a feature to somewhat curate your timeline automatically is what stops it from wide adoption.

Citation needed. There’s always something that someone points out as “the reason that stops Mastodon from wide adoption”, yet its usage continues to rise slow and steady. Maybe what’s wrong is not the slow adoption of Mastodon, but the rapid adoption of other social networks which have billions of dollars behind them with perverse incentives to consume your life so you consume advertised products.

I tried to quit twitter for Mastodon (because it felt more like an open effort than a facebook-esque megacorp) but I was immediately confused by the distributed thing. I thought it was going to be distributed in terms of how it operated, not in terms of the actual social networks being more or less separated. I understood I could follow people from other instances, but only if the instance was somehow connected to the other instance. This confused me even more. How do I pick an instance without ever running into the risk that interesting person X joins in the future and doesn't pick an instance disconnected from the group of instances I'm in?

Basically I just use twitter for news: I follow some big names and organizations and just read from the firehose of news coming out. I probably have a lower than 1/10000 read to write ratio.

Am I trying to use Mastodon like Twitter in a way it wasn't designed for?

Well - I'm not blaming the user, but that's how it's on any federated service. People don't seem to have the same complaints about email or matrix. While it's possible to create a global index of all Mastodon users, I personally feel that it is best enjoyed without it.

I have a very satisfying personal feed on Mastodon. There are personal acquaintances whose address I received directly from them - like how email addresses are exchanged traditionally. Some addresses were collected from webpages I'm interested in. All the rest are people whose comments were boosted by others and caught my eye.

All the above, together with whatever algorithm Mastodon uses seem to give me a much more interesting and less addictive experience than the traditional social media. Mastodon doesn't hand hold you in creating a feed. It does need a bit of effort. However, the result is high quality.

Ironically, the only way to do that now is posting on twitter, asking people to reply with their mastodon accounts

Have a healthy conversation? I know some people who stopped or reduced social media usage because that was pretty much impossible. Plus the local feed thing. Start an instance for your neighbourhood, follow people who are on there, and you've got all the neighbourhoodly gossip on there. Whilst still being able to follow whoever else you want (except Wil Wheaton because he went to a non-federated instance)

Totally agree. The whole server focus is not user friendly or intuitive.

As an example I finally found someone to follow and decided to look at the people rhey were following, but it would only show me people from that server.

The complete lack of discoverability is jarring. Really not sure Mastodon is ready for mass market.

Somehow Mastodon has 3 millions of users despite those problems AFAIK, and growing exponentially.

How many of those are human?

> just hundreds on Mastodon

Whereas those are most probably actual people.