atomicpoet, 1 year ago

It’s extremely arguable that making mastodon.social the default server has resulted in easier account sign-ups.

What’s not arguable is that this change hasn’t resulted in an increase in Mastodon sign-ups.

It’s also not arguable that registrations from bots and spammers have increased and this occurred after mastodon.social was made the default Mastodon server.

Too many people (including media) believed that a default server would result in a massive increase in Mastodon account sign-ups, and that simply hasn’t been the case.

atomicpoet, 1 year ago

There’s a reason media people and armchair analysts don’t often make a good product team replacement.

What’s often “common sense” is simply not a good idea when put into practice.

This is why most product dev teams do lots of A/B testing before implementing needed changes.

Customer feedback is important. But customer feedback often fails to address what the product actually needs.

And I feel this was the case with making mastodon.social the “default” server.

atomicpoet, 1 year ago

To be blunt, more than making Mastodon easier for sign-ups, what it actually needs is a better UI/UX, better search and social discovery, and a big new feature release that gets people excited about Mastodon again.

atomicpoet, 1 year ago

More important than sign-ups for Mastodon is increasing user satisfaction.

Happy Mastodon users results in more Mastodon adoption.

Unhappy Mastodon users results not only in churn but other people not even starting the sign-up process.

If you need evidence of this, talk to #BlackTwitter. Many of them simply won’t try Mastodon because the Black folk who ventured onto Mastodon found the experience wanting.

Simply put, it’s more important to increase Mastodon satisfaction than aim for more sign-ups.

What good are sign-ups if people ultimately leave Mastodon?

atomicpoet, 1 year ago

One reason I believe it's more important to emphasize #SpreadFediverse over #SpreadMastodon is because spreading the Fediverse partially addresses the problem of Mastodon churn.

Understand that even if #Mastodon was the best, most intuitive service ever made, there will always be churn because somebody won't like it -- and that's okay.

But when people churn, it's far better for people to move elsewhere on the Fediverse than return to Big Social.

This is a big reason why I'm running https://calckey.social, and why I'm also trying to make it easier for people to start up their own servers through #SpaceHost.

Oh, and it's definitely important that we share news about the greater Fediverse so that churning Mastodon users realize that they have options.

HistoPol, 1 year ago

@atomicpoet

Agreed 😀

https://calckey.social/notes/9ex666e02y