It has grown beyond six million users. How is that "will [not] ever grow"?
Mastodon doesn't need to follow the "rules" of big tech, or corporations. Mastodon is a success the moment two people can successfully communicate with it. Or six million. Nothing else matters. There's no difference.
There are no shareholders that want to see increasing MAUs. There are no investors that want to exit and therefore insist on ballooning the numbers. There are no employees that will loose their jobs when growth lags, nor advertisers that want to get ever more eyeballs else they leave for [other corp].
It really doesn't matter what any of those fictional "average users" does: whether they follow, stay, go back, whatever: as long as the people using mastodon now have a good time, and get value today, its a huge success. There honestly isn't anything else needed.
I'm talking about mainstream adoption. Mastodon is never going to be anything more than a niche phenomenon. Similar to how odysee is never going to be the next YouTube, which is even more ridiculous that people believed that.
If you want the masses you need a "classic" setup: big commercial company, lots of money and a centralized infrastructure.
That's a silly take. It all comes from the perspective that Mastodon has to be the next big thing. This is BS. It can stay small and serve those who choose to use it.
Seriously. Mastodon started at thousands. People wrote articles insisting it would never go anywhere. It's still growing with thousands of instances for every sort of community three years after the dismissive op-eds started, and it didn't have the benefit of a major profile promoting it.
Mastodon is not profit-driven. It doesn't need growth. It does, perhaps, need enough people to keep it sustainable, but I suspect that it has that and more already.
Six years of steady growth is a Silicon Valley failure. It is not a failure by any reasonable measure. I predicted back in the early days that Mastodon would grow slowly and organically as more people figured it out and helped people in their circles come over. It's slow and steady, but I was right. This is how things grew before anything less than a double-digit billion sale to one of the big tech companies was seen as a failure.
Why are tech people so behind mastodon? If this is true this sounds incredibly worrying to scale; to the point where mastodon is limiting it's own growth potential
It's a total failure. John Mastodon, the CEO and founder of Mastodon, was just fired from the company after their stock prices hit an all time low.
That's not how it works. It's open source and can be forked and improved upon. It doesn't need millions of users to survive and be useful to a lot of us.
I really enjoy Mastodon and believe it has staying power.
Not rocket ship “going to explode and burn out” power. There’s enough there to keep people engaged. The decentralized nature means there’s always corners of it alive and growing.
It's because some people really like mastodon and there's a lot of, at best, odd arguments going around why it'll never work. Never mind that for a large amount of people it's already working.
Mastodon doesn't need to follow the "rules" of big tech, or corporations. Mastodon is a success the moment two people can successfully communicate with it. Or six million. Nothing else matters. There's no difference.
There are no shareholders that want to see increasing MAUs. There are no investors that want to exit and therefore insist on ballooning the numbers. There are no employees that will loose their jobs when growth lags, nor advertisers that want to get ever more eyeballs else they leave for [other corp].
It really doesn't matter what any of those fictional "average users" does: whether they follow, stay, go back, whatever: as long as the people using mastodon now have a good time, and get value today, its a huge success. There honestly isn't anything else needed.
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