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> I have thousands of followers on Twitter

How many of those are human?

> just hundreds on Mastodon

Whereas those are most probably actual people.



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> Secondly, I use Mastodon, and I'm on an instance with just over 1000 users. There are over 150K users on the main instance.

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


> The correct way to use Mastodon is to follow hashtags, not people, and use lots of hashtags in your posts and comments so other people can find them.

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?


> joining an instance with a large user count has all of the same issues as Twitter with more drawbacks in the UX

I'm on mastodon.social, which is the bigger one, and my posts there have way more likes, shares and replies than on Twitter, where I have more followers but seems like I'm just talking to the void.


> Typically people seem to largely get far more engagement with a far smaller number of followers on Mastodon

Are we talking about mastodon or threads? Do you think Threads won't have an algorithmic feed?

It obviously will, so this point is only relevant to mastodon, which is still 100x smaller than twitter.


>When I go on Mastodon, half the posts there are bitching about 'how bad' X is.

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 mean, really. Who is on there?

141 million people and 33 million DAU in less than 6 months.

So basically already about 15 times more than Mastodon, which was released 7 years ago.


> Well, you have to make money somehow and users will never pay for social media

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


> Mastodon.social has over 150k users

What would be more interesting as a number is active users.

For example, I've got an account at mastodon.social, but last time I used it is over a month ago and before that there had been several months of inactivity.

When I last looked at my friend list and follower list on mastodon it seemed like most people treated mastodon like that.


> Mastodon is sitting at around 1.5M users,

I've seen a stat of over 13m users: https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount


>> Were there 100 different Twitter-like companies

>... they would all be bankrupt.

Huh? There's over 2,000 Mastodon servers doing just fine


> Yes, you're more or less correct. However, as someone who ditched Twitter for Mastodon, I don't miss Twitter. There's a vibrant community on Mastodon and you'll feel right at home.

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?


> I have some friends operating a Mastodon server, with a team of volunteer operators, and I'm pretty sure I've met all of them in person.

But this will never describe a significant portion of Twitter users. It might work for some, but it wont replace Twitter.


> A piece of social networking software that gets popular does bring a certain audience/reach to its creator.

Does it? I have no idea who created Mastodon.


> When I go on Mastodon, half the posts there are bitching about 'how bad' X is. The engagement on posts is extremely poor as well. No one replies to anything.

That's not my experience at all. Who are you following?

In my niche, Apple platform software development, the community has almost entirely migrated from Twitter to Mastodon, and it's now as active and thriving as ever.

IMO the Mastodon experience is even better than the Twitter experience was, because there are a lot fewer random trolls on Mastodon.

My little niche was the reason I originally joined Twitter back in 2008, so frankly, I don't really miss the millions of other people. I was never interested in following celebrities.


> So you're arguing that lots of people use Mastodon?

It has 1 million active users so... yeah, lots of people use Mastodon.


> my takeaway here is, wow, Mastodon is pretty desolate.

Because one guy has three replies on a post? That’s an interesting analysis.

He has a twitter linked on his profile, by the way, which has similar engagement numbers.

> the responses he got were not very empathetic with regard to his legal bills.

Did you hit your head?


> "I do not want to believe Mastodon is successful, since it hurts my view."

What? I like Mastodon, it just doesn't have any people from the circles I follow on Twitter. I don't think the average user (who I was talking about btw) who follows mainstream celebrities does either.

Anyway I didn't bother reading the rest of your post, seems like you're coming from a place of anger.


> Why not?

Because the common person expects content and content creators to be surfaced for them. Which Mastodon instance provides this for the larger fediverse?

> The only thing the fediverse lacks that Twitter really provided was the starfucking celebrity culture.

Well, that and the other millions of regular people that are just hanging out and posting on Twitter. I'd love to see them come to Mastodon but they have no incentive.


> We are talking about Mastodon's DAU which that is still a mystery.

Is this an admission that 50,000 was just an invented number out of nowhere?

Here are some stats though: https://api.joinmastodon.org/statistics

> Mastodon fans (like yourself)

Mastodon users like myself

> there are 'millions of users' using it daily

Not millions plural, but over a million according to the link above.

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