I’ve been using fediverse stuff (Mastodon and, most recently, Calckey – I’m just going to use “Mastodon” as shorthand here, purists can bite me) for over a year now, a…
One thing I haven't seen mentioned here is the effect that Mastodon have an opinionated dev team (in a refuses to implement certain features kind of way) had on wider adoption. Would things have been better with a platform more willing to listen to it's users?
So how is Kbin going to cover its operating costs? If a fediverse server must survive on donations, it seems like donating should be built into the user experience. For example, there could be a Kbin Gold similar to Reddit Gold.
I remember years ago when Reddit Gold first became a thing there was a progress bar on the site indicating how much of their daily server costs had been covered by Reddit Gold. Something like that might be useful.
You misunderstand what kbin is, if you think there's A server that has to cover operating costs. kbin isn't a site, it's just server software, it's meant to be run in many many places, and those individual servers talk to each other.
Who's going to be paid for the ongoing maintenance of the software? Who's going to pay for the servers the software's run on? A decentralized architecture doesn't remove the operating costs of a large scale social media site. As the article alludes to, it might even increase operating costs.
To be honest, I'm not interested in small, niche communities. I want the fediverse to grow into something that can rival social media giants like Reddit, and Twitter. How a site is monetized is as key of a feature as anything else, because without monetization, a site is doomed.
Who's going to be paid for the ongoing maintenance of the software?
I'd imagine no one in particular. It's donations and open-source model. Eventually (if it gets popular) it might get some other business model or grants from FOSS funds. Remains to be seen.
Who's going to pay for the servers the software's run on?
Same here. Donations and/or whoever hosts the servers. Instances should grow to whatever their maintainer can afford/has planned. Then they should close signups. Other instances might pop up. There are currently a lot of Lemmy instances and some people are starting to spin up new kbin instances.
How a site is monetized
Eventually someone is probably going to try ads for their site.
But fediverse is not just "a site". It's many. They all have their own rules, plans and ambitions.
I never thought of how capping sign ups doesn't affect you in the fediverse... you can just sign up on a different instance! Very cool to think that server hosts can stay within their own limitations.
I thought that kbin was a website in Poland that implements the ActivityPub protocol and so it's able to talk to and share posts with other websites in the "fediverse" such as: Lemmy, kilioa.org, fedia.io, ect.. because they implement the same protocol. But I'm very new here so I'm not really sure!
kbin is the software. kbin.social Is in Poland, I think, you'd need to ask Ernest to verify. But kbin.social isn't kbin it's just a kbin instance, the strength (and it can be argued, weakness) of kbin (and other federated software) is that it's intended to be run on many smaller, individual instances, that talk to each other, rather than be just one big monolithic site (reddit, facebook, twitter, etc).
It's a different way of looking at things, and thinking about things, and it comes with it's own quirks and challenges.
Operating costs are something I worry about a bit as a user. If there's nothing or nothing obvious enough, the site will just die because it will become too expensive. Surviving off donations for the sake of donations is possible, but it's hard. I mean, Wikipedia is a household name and it still has to beg for donations with massive, guilt tripping banners.
And Reddit Gold gave some perks I think perhaps from the start? I forget the exact details of what it was like when it was first introduced, but at the very least, its biggest usage was as basically a "super upvote". It wasn't just to donate to the site, but also to inform someone that a post or comment they made was really good. I think it may have also given a short period without ads?
I invested lots of time into Google+ and built up a following of 26,000 there. Then it closed down days before I started my Patreon campaign. Yes, I am still bitter about that.
Then I shifted my attention to Twitter. And then, last year, Elon Musk took it over.
I am done investing effort in corporate-owned social media sites that must inevitably follow the #Enshittification principle. No, Mastodon (and the Fediverse in general) did not absorb as many Twitter users as we hoped. Still, I think in the long run the Fediverse will grow, as corporate social media proves again and again that they cannot be trusted.
I don't think Mastodon is as resistant to enshittification as everyone seems to think. Or rather, I think the drivers towards enshittification still exist - primarily, economic pressures relating to operational costs, and the human cost of managing communities - but because there is no actual revenue stream that can even potentially be gained from enshittification and the users won't tolerate anything that might amount to it, what winds up instead happening is that instances just close when their admins either run out of money or burn out. The service on instance X doesn't get "enshittified", it just ends.
This is a nice outcome though, since users can move to another server, bringing their followers and network with them. It also prevents long drawn out migrations like we see with twitter, because either you move on or you have nothing.
I mostly agree, it's not perfect, we're nowhere near the endgame yet. However even the situation you described would be better than now, where I can't bring my twitter followers anywhere with me.
Being someone who is on Mastodon and also have to still be on Twitter for professional reasons, I consistently get way more engagement to my posts on Mastodon.
Plus, I have been able to build a larger following in Mastodon within a year than I was able to in Twitter in the eight years or so I have had an account there.
Anybody who expected Mastodon to simply become Twitter minus Elon Musk, was being naive and that didn't exactly happen. But as a platform on its own, Mastodon is a success. As a user, I consistently see more interesting content on Mastodon than Twitter or pretty much any other social media platform (except maybe Reddit till they decided to screw up).
Honestly, I would recommend everyone here who hasn't already to sign up to a Mastodon server in addition to Kbin.
Not the person you're replying to, but if I want to use a Twitter-alike, I want to use a UI geared towards that. If I want to use a Reddit-alike, I want to use a UI geared towards that.
The idea of using Twitter to interact with a Reddit post sounds horrible, or Twitter to interact with YouTube (or YouTube to interact with Twitter!)
The Twitter migration failed because in my opinion Twitter hasn't died (yet), if Twitter continues how it's going, for example limiting the amount of direct messages a unverified user can send, eventually there will be a migration.
Digg migration was a success because the change they did was too extreme and sudden.
Big social networks have died in the past and I think Twitter will be no exception.
The problem is that the Fediverse is currently too clunky for normal people to accept it and migrate.
If Twitter dies, it'll be a company like Meta with their upcoming Threads app that brings in the users. Not something where I have to take the extra step of picking an instance and do extra verification to make sure the Drake I'm following is the real Drake.
Just to add some context here, I was around for the start of Twitter, somewhere in the first 10k users, and you have to realise that even with Twitter these things just weren't there at the start either, it took years for Twitter to move away from SMS for posting, formalising things such as retweets and hashtags, all of which were started by users.
I can still remember watching Diggnation when Kevin Rose first passed 100k followers, it took a long while after until celebs started joining and the million plus accounts started arriving.
These things take time and gradual growth, the fact that there are Mastodon accounts with 100k plus followers already puts it way ahead of the original Twitter growth curve, likewise for Kbin with 150k+ users and thousands of communities already.
The problem here is what the article says - Mastodon isn't competing against the primitive Twitter of 2008, it's competing against the much more mature and generally huge Twitter of 2023.
I think comparing follower numbers is a bad metric - it's very easy to be a big fish in a small pond, and Mastodon's pond is very small indeed, and has shrunk dramatically in terms of active users since December.
Digg migration was a success because reddit was already the main source of information. 50% of digg posts were "stolen" from reddit. The content was already existing on reddit and if you could get over its "oldschool" looks, it was a straight up superior site in every way.
This cannot be said about the current reddit/twitter competitors.
I don't agree. Reddit was a buggy mess with a reputation for pretentious conversations, a terrible UX, and a lack of content. I believe the exodus succeeded because:
Kevin Rose was so far up his own ass that he refused to rewind the extremely unpopular changes. The changes all happened at the same time, and he didn't give users a way to opt out. He didn't boil the frog like Reddit has been. This is, IMHO, the largest and most disruptive move Reddit has taken since Digg v4.
Reddit was "capable" of handling the millions of monthly users. The content followed. For years we had to contend with a much worse UX, including frequent crashes, but we did so because Digg's design was worse. For the Fediverse to succeed, someone needs to invest heavily into infrastructure to support a large migration.
So much of Reddit's post were just reposts of stuff on Twitter. And Twitter's success was really due to a cadre of highly connected journalists and celebrities who could generate content
In other words, everything is a lot more fragile than you think. A big migration from Twitter to some other site, either Mastodon/Fediverse or even Tiktok, will kill Twitter. And if people don't repost those things to Reddit, Reddit will follow suite too.
Even Digg technically survived Digg v4 (it's still around BTW). MySpace did not instantly shut down once Facebook got popular. Twitter is dying because we can figure out the direction of where it is headed. Mastodon will be the most popular recipient, but it won't be the only one. It is wrong to describe the migration as a "failure" because it is still on-going.
I'm not sure it failed.
I joined Mastodon in Apr 03, 2017 - but was never really very active because - well, there wasn't really much to be active with. It was ghost town. But it grew slowly and organically. Which was OK.
Then the big Twitter meltdown happened in Nov 22 and all of a sudden we got couple of million new users. There was a lot of adjustment, from new people and the old inhabitants. It wasn't very pretty (the whole CW debacle).
Many of those millions left and (presumably) went back to Twitter. But many stayed. The twitter InfoSec community is (mostly) on Mastodon now. Quite a lot of science-twitter is as well. We're far bigger place now than we were before 22.
Twitter didn't crash and burn (yet). People went back. But I don't think the migration failed. Some stayed and we're richer place for it.
But I agree with lot of the things in the post. Dealing with federation, quirky UI's, prototype services (hi kbin!) and other linuxesque peculiarities isn't what mainstream is looking for. The whole "just spin up your own fedi-server" might not be very sustainable/environmentally friendly compared to centralized well maintained datacenter. There are lot of problems to solve before fediverse is "mainstream ready".
But to be quite honest. I'm not sure it needs to be. Yes, I get that it's hard to "build following" without mainstream, but to be honest, I actually prefer more signal and less noise. And lot of the "mainstream" is just noise who follow popular accounts because they're popular.
I still don't get why people wanna stay, all the toxic users get now top priority (a.k.a. people who pay for Twitter Blue) and they promote toxic tweets
Not for long. Some started to go to Mastodon, and I'm begging my favorite indie VTubers to make accounts on Mastodon even if they will still use Twitter.
I was just telling my wife this over coffee this morning. She had seen an article about reddit on BBC news and asked what the difference was between this move and twitter. And my response was exactly this.
I think a lot of it too is people don't want to lean a new system. I've seen multiple big influencers on Twitter basically day they had no interest in using Mastodon because they didn't want to learn a new platform and so instead the begrudgingly keep using Twitter. People don't like change and will sometimes torture themselves to avoid it
To an extent, influencers wouldn't get on with Mastodon anyway.
Looking at it charitably from their point of view, the discovery is so poor that actually building a following there is a huge amount of work they probably won't see a return on. It's a much smaller audience that in no small part resents even the idea of an "influencer" - someone who has that as their line of work is going to struggle and consider it not worth their time.
Looking at it less charitably, Mastodon does not reward activity on its own but instead things only get attention if they're actually worth attention, so carpet-bombing fedi with posts most people don't actually value is a waste of their time, and it's a lot more effort than such people would typically be willing to expend.
That's understandable but I was more referring to influencers whose main profitability is elsewhere such as YouTube and they are using Twitter as a means of communicating with their audience/just post random life updates.
That being said are there influencers that actually make money from Twitter? I feel like Twitter has always been more of an engagement platform for influencers rather than a platform they actually make money off of
I can say why I didn’t stay: I was never a twitter user to begin with, and I tried to use mastodon when everyone tried to shift and I just didn’t like the format. Felt like work.
Indeed - I think people seem to have this ill-conceived notion that Twitter has to fail for Mastodon to succeed.
From my perspective, both are doing just fine. Mastodon has developed a community with, in my opinion, much higher quality discussion, and well, Twitter can keep being twitter.
That said, what I do think helps here is that Kbin has a much lower barrier to entry. I find it much easier to sign up on here than trying to determine which Mastodon instance to use and I think that helps tremendously.
That said, what I do think helps here is that Kbin has a much lower barrier to entry. I find it much easier to sign up on here than trying to determine which Mastodon instance to use and I think that helps tremendously.
Kbin is technically federated and Kbin.social is technically just an instance on a federated network, the federation is just broken right now. But the simple fact of that not being a consideration, and everyone signing up on Kbin.social, has led to comments like this where "it's so much easier".
It rather proves my point; putting decentralised whatever front and centre makes things pointlessly complex and offputting to end users. They don't want to think about this shit, they just want to read stuff and post. The less they have to think about this shit, and/or the less this shit has an impact on their experience, the better for them.
Twitter is dying. It won't go with a bang, but with a farce.
As their service becomes more hostile and promotes more toxicity, more of them will leave the site eventually. First the infosec left, and now many artists are also begun to at least get a foot in the fediverse. And once the service will be even more hostile to them, they will leave too.
Then will come all the other people until only the far-right conspiracy theorists and crypto scammers remain. By that time, it might even become a paid and very bad Mastodon instance due to downscaling.
IMO, on Mastodon for example, most people don't understand federation and don't care about it. It sounds scary and complicated to them. And also in Mastodon's case at least, it's still extremely difficult IMO, to find people/sites/etc. to follow about topics you care about. You still, AFAIK, can't search by posts which is just dumb, IMO (at least on the instance/server) I'm on.
The whole pick an instance/server thing also confuses people. Most people don't care about that and don't even need to know TBH. Just auto-assign them to the most popular one and those who care about such things can manually pick their own.
It logins could somehow be federated it would solve the whole instancing issue but it’s far easier to state the idea than I imagine the execution would be.
I know you can do that, but personally I don't care for that. IMO, that feels like forcing people to use hashtags and sometimes I don't want to use them.
The whole pick an instance/server thing also confuses people.
Yeah, and there's more than one reason to recommend the bigger instances. As the article points out, it's the most reliable way to get exposed to the largest variety of users and other instances. This was fairly standard advice when I joined way back in 2018: "just join the main one. figure out who to follow and what servers you like. when you start feeling comfortable, you can move your profile to the server you want."
And that's what I did before settling in elekk.
You're right, but it's not just most people on Mastodon. Most people don't understand or care about federation. I'm fairly tech savvy and I didn't know that until 15 minutes ago I could see kbin microblogs on Mastodon if I wanted. It's a feature that most tech-savvy users think is cool and 95% of normal people will find overly convoluted.
Most people just want to know where to follow Ariana Grande or Adam Schefter.
Yep, that's true of the Fediverse in general. Most people don't care about all of that. They just want to follow and interact with people/brands/etc. they like.
People don't care about decentralisation, but one of selling points of the Fediverse may be pretty similar to that: interoperability.
IMHO, some separate but federated servers make sense for a newcomer more, than other. They are:
Flagship Mastodon server (for the "official blessing"),
Several very large Mastodon servers for niches - Infosec, FOSS and Gamedev communities already have got these (for best discovery of that niche communities and still good discovery of out-niche content - thanks to size),
At least one national Mastodon server in your language - of course open to registration - Japanese, British, German, Italian, French, Dutch, Canadian, Australian, Chinese are the largest, but any language-specific will satisfy the user (for best discovery of content in their languages or from regions - helped by language barreer),
Some largeish Mastodon instances with specific political leanings - anarchist, far-right and libertarian ones are the largest (for better-tailored moderation, and also for discovery),
Flagship/largest instances of other Fediverse software, such as Akkoma, Lemmy, /kbin, Bookwyrm, Misskey, Calckey, Pixelfed (for features of their software, being their advantages over Mastodon)
Some national instances of Lemmy, /kbin, Bookwyrm, Misskey, Calckey, Pixelfed in your language (combined language and feature reasons),
Few Lemmy instances with specific political leanings - communist and far-right ones (combined moderation and feature reasons).
We do not have to talk about "decentralised" insert app name here network, but we can rather promote "Large Infosec-oriented microblog which interoperates with entire of rest of Mastodon", "German Reddit-alternative aggregator which interoperates with fedi", "A combined aggregator and microblog instance, compatible both with Lemmy and Mastodon", "Anarchist social network with access to much of fedi", "Mastodon-compatible microblog with fancy formatting", or "Instagram-equivalent with access to Mastodon but larger photo limits per post, and filtres", etc.
This interoperability means, that any new and sufficiently promoted (or simply receiving another Great Migration) server can claim over 1 million Mastodon&co users as the potential audience.
If you were already present on both Reddit and e.g. Facebook, and recent events forced you to switch from Reddit to /kbin or Lemmy, then you started to be on the Fediverse. And any your friend from Facebook started to be able to contact with you on the Fediverse, should they switch.
If you were present previously only on Facebook and Twitter, and you friend was only on Facebook and Reddit, then, after Twitter and Reddit Migrations, both of you began to be able to talk to each other, without the need of Facebook!
Every great migration to the Fediverse sows the seed. Sooner or earlier, all your friends will be present on fedi, and the network effects will begin to work to the advantage of fedi, not against it.
You need to define "failed" before you attempt to qualify/quantify. It changed the playing field. I've never been active on social media before I found my mastodon community. The normies will always be on Twitter, the way there are still some on AOL.
IMO having a good search function that searches across the ENTIRE fediverse would go a long way. Not having this good search function makes it hard to find content.
Lemmy has lemmy.directory, which tries to follow every Lemmy community and provide view comparable to r/all.
PeerTube creators (Framasoft) have made SepiaSearch, which indexes several hundreds PeerTube instances.
They obviously made the same utility to search events and groups across umpteen Mobilizon instances.
This proves that the "global" search on the fediverse is possible.
I don't think there was a failure, there's like 10 million users more than there used to be in just a few months. The more these social media companies fuck over their users, we'll keep seeing the waves come crashing in.
Great article. I skimmed some parts and close-read others and didn’t find anything to disagree with. “People are quite adept at making compromises on their beliefs for the sake of utility or pleasure” especially hit home. This is why my middle of the road and even progressive-minded friends continue to use Twitter: they can create a permission structure that allows it.
UX, UX, UX. When a massive group of people wants to leave a platform, there must be an intuitive, thoughtfully designed, reasonably available alternative available that moment. Platforms like Mastodon make users feel full of questions. They feel lost. They go back where they came from because at least things made sense there, even if the guy running it is a proudly heartless lunatic.
The Digg migration — no hashtag back then — succeeded because there was such an alternative: Reddit. I agree with you that the closed source nature of the software didn’t factor and won’t factor for 99% of users. We just want a place where the product decisions are made differently.
So far I think Kbin is okay. I came here, I joined, and I never think about other servers or instances. It looks and feels a lot like Reddit. I don’t care about followers, so there isn’t some count to give me anxiety about having something mid-configured.
The only problem is when normal people compare a new and fledgling website against an existing mature ecosystem. Even if the mature site is dying, it will win out most of the time. People have lost their ability to practice patience. Our internet culture has made us want something now rather than make us cultivate the things we want to see. This is why people dislike Mastodon, Lemmy, Tildes, Kbin, and Squabble. they, the normal internet user, want these sites to be instantly mature and thriving when they visit them, they don't want to exert the effort to help them grow. They don't realize that if they want to see and experience something they want, they sometimes must exert an effort to cultivate it,
The thing is, you're doing the exact thing that the article mentions about forgiving defects in a product - and not interrogating whether there are any changes needed or things that it could do better - because you are close to it and invested in it.
It's not the job of some random user who wants to shitpost on $amicrobloggingapp to put in work to nurture an alternative that doesn't properly meet their needs. Most will accept that a growing platform will be quieter than the one they're leaving; they will not accept quiet and, from their point of view, broken as a platform.
And frankly, a lot of people did put in that work too, and got treated with suspicion and hostility. New users can't seem to ever win; they try to stick around and shape $whateveritis to meet their needs, they get accused of trying to take over and change the direction of someone else's home. They leave, they weren't committed enough to the vision, or in your words patient enough to make it work.
I've checked out mastodon and other federated twitter clones quite a few times, and never felt the need to migrate. Twitter has always been more active, and felt more polished and solid. In comparison the federated sites felt small and restricted. Since musk took over, twitter has been even better than it was before, so again no pressure felt to move. I still use twitter.
In comparison, reddit has been my home for like 12 years and this blackout has really fucked up my usage of reddit. Kbin feels nearly identical to reddit, even if it's a bit smaller. I still find myself clicking onto reddit, only to realize that my subs are missing, so then I move back over here to kbin.
Kbin is cozy. I like how I can see other federated sites' content easily, I like how kbin magazines and fediverse microblog are both clearly distinguished. It feels like I'm on a new reddit, but with the ability to see the fediverse as well. it's cozy. Provided there's still content, there's a solid chance I'll stick around.
The only thing I'd like to see is if I could do twitter/mastodon style self-posts for microblog. Right now it seems I have to select a specific magazine? But it feels weird selecting a magazine/community for just my own rambles/musings? I ended up making a magazine matching my kbin name for this purpose, but idk what the proper way to do things is...
In technicals it definitely has degraded for sure. I wouldn't say it "died" though. People still post on there, there's activity, people are free to share stuff, etc.
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