Musk is indeed a dictator of one. And as much as I love Mastodon, the train left the station & it missed it. And without the equity of a mover like the EU or the US govt, it's sadly never going to pull in users to attain critical mass.
@kurtsh At the end where he talks about the public good, PBS etc. it almost seems like he is making the case for Mastodon or something like it. His only real diss early on about Mastodon was that older folk can never learn how to choose an instance. If X is as bad as he claims, surely the instance thing can be overcome here.
@JonChevreau The real problem Adam pointed out was 'critical mass'. The ease of enrollment jab was just throwaway snark.
The value of a network is its active users & Twitter has locked those folks in because people go where they can make an impact, where there are others like themselves or where they can feel connected with their interests/community.
@JonChevreau If govts were set up their own highly available, protected Mastodon services, I'd have a lot more hope because there'd be a reason for everyone to enroll. Otherwise there's not really any definitive reason or community need for people to join.
@kurtsh@JonChevreau
And those instances could enable the communications they use the hellsite for, plus interaction with others in the fediverse and whatever customization they want, since they would have admin control.
@dbc3 That's where I believe Mastodon should be making their investment. Enterprise class, managed services - not just hosted services. Decentralized of course but with:
☑️DDOS protection
☑️Disaster recovery
☑️Backup/restore
☑️Governance/Retention policies
☑️Compliance auditing
☑️Service Level Agreements
☑️Content filtering
☑️BLAH BLAH BLAH
Just look at what managed govt email services provide.
Ex: Govt institutions will need Mastodon to process/discover/delete user content for GDPR requests.
@kurtsh Too early to declare a winner. Threads has hit critical mass for Blue American voters & the pro Democracy crowd, and that’s in less than 5 months. Mastodon hits similar audience & appeals to those who don’t want billionaire-controlled algorithms throttling their feeds. TS is a MAGA silo and X is headed that way if it doesn’t implode further. BS is invite only & owned by a rich guy. It makes sense to seriously be on 3 or 4 sites for now & see how it all shakes out.
@JonChevreau Too early? Well, active users = value & Mastodon growth is stagnant: What future miracle is going to grow Mastodon by 10x?
☑️Threads has 100M. Anyone on Instagram is walked thru Threads enrollment & like it or not, it's active. Mastodon has only 9M users & has no such growth opportunity.
☑️BlueSky has 2M & needed a self-sustaining populous but constrained growth thru invites & lost momentum. Don't see them reinvigorating that. Mastodon has no such enrollment mktg like invites.
@JonChevreau Mastodon needs a self-perpetuating catalyst & there are usually 3 sources of this:
Money
Radical innovation
Govt intervention
Money doesn't happen without users & vice versa so that's a catch 22.
I've heard no game changing innovations on the horizon to attract users but I'd love to see them.
That leaves govt. If we got civic institutions mandating Mastodon usage to participate in govt services (traffic alerts, town halls, power outages, etc.) that'd be something.
@kurtsh@JonChevreau 1) I think Mastodon is perfect for govt social media broadcasting. Govt gets to own the platform and the content. There's also zero cost for constituents to participate. Even with other "free" social media platforms participating requires payment through advertising exposure.
Government can also maintain data sovereignty by hosting their instance within their jurisdiction.
@kurtsh@JonChevreau 2) To your larger point though I don't think govt participation generates the type of mass adoption that I think is the point of your post. That needs to happen organically and right now I get the sense that stake holders in the fediverse aren't even sure if mass adoption is a goal. Until that's more or less decided looking at ways to bring more people under the tent is a lame duck discussion.
@mike@JonChevreau I agree with you re: marginal adoption government could generate but in the absence of cash, what else is there?
Don't agree with organic growth being the only path but regarding goals, that's absolutely a good point & worth thinking about. If there's no actual desire to drive value & to be clear, users = value, then what's the point, right?
@kurtsh@JonChevreau
If governments were constrained from using for-profit social media, which collects private data on users, that would chop X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads off at the knees.
@kurtsh I am rooting for Mastodon just because it provides a cleaner feed once you have key Follows in place. The higher the quality of your Follows, the better the feed. Threads is a useful supplement if you care about Democracy but each site can feed and amplify important posts on the other. So I am a dual citizen, and still drop in on X, restricting myself there mostly to my own financial wheelhouse.
@JonChevreau Yeah, my point isn't about what I or anyone else likes or prefers. It's more about what Mastodon strategically needs to demonstrably grow... without money.
Mastodon reminds me of the Blu-ray/HD-DVD wars. HD-DVD was supported by WarnerBros/Universal/LionsGate/MGM & was better technically & provided more autonomy. Blu-ray had 3 major backers: Sony/Disney/Paramount & had lousy tech.
But in the end, Sony just thru $1B at Warner to switch to Blu-ray & just like that HD-DVD was dead.
@kurtsh@JonChevreau
Beta was a vastly better format than VHS, it was production shooting, when you weren't filming, just slowed down 6x for the home market to have 180min not 30min tapes.
Backers matter, often more than the merits of the format.
I see these benefits of Fediverse for society & problem solving discussions very regularly. Yet am I seeing the people involved in them actually promoting the Fediverse on corporate media?
I would like to follow those that are, and boost them there.
@ArtBear@JonChevreau LOL. I thought of VHS/BetaMax initially but thought no one would get the reference.
☑️Mastodon has no money & has nothing driving user adoption
☑️There's not enough value for most social users & it's sadly been relegated as a niche
I love Mastodon & think it would be great if it were as ubiquitous a service as 'email servers'. I'd love if people used ActivityPub like they do IMAP4/SMTP.
... butI don't see that happening without agreements or covenants being established.
🤬 👿 Aha, now I have your attention (but b4 you 🔥BBQ🔥 me) if you use your #Twitter account to promote the Fedi, & cool stuff here, plz let me know & I'll follow you with my @artbear1000 account & boost ur Fedi promo posts.
The #Fedi has no marketing dept.
Fedi has no advertising budgets.
It just has us users. If we want more uptake & better communications & democracy, then WE have to do outreach jobs. Not just talk about it.😂 😁 ❤️
@ArtBear@JonChevreau Oh absolutely. But I'm sorry: While admirable, the 'Wisdom of the Crowds' isn't gonna make Mastodon successful. We lose more active users daily on Mastodon than we could ever hope to gain through grassroots evangelism.
Government usage, corporate adoption, revenue generation for creators... Harnessing another massive adoption driver to get the flywheel spinning is the way I see Mastodon growing. That's why I'm trying to figure out & possibly take action on.
-A linkedIn type directory which would leverage the gobsmacking amount of technical & creative talent & capability we have floating around here unaware of each other & give Fedi a user owned career resource.
-Search, links & archival systems to empower discovery research academia/journals & compensate for the increasing enshittificiation of corporate search.
-A Fedi Etsy/Ebay system to link makers with customers
@kurtsh@JonChevreau
But there is stuff that every one of us does that is engaging here.
Personally here are a couple of things that a very ordinary simple account like mine can do that I have been told a few times now actually kept some people here, got their feet planted established & so on.
I noticed a big gap in band hashtags when I arrived. I love music, lots different types. So I hashtagged fully when I posted music. Over time it's grown to a 600 track playlist. https://mastodonapp.uk/@ArtBear/111445328504969483
I set my Twitter account up as an offramp with pinned guide how to leave Twitter
I keep pinned guide on my profile for landing & finding one's feet a bit here on the Fedi
So I'm not disagreeing with you evangelism alone isn't enough. I'm not saying what I did was super important/cool/useful. However I do know that as 1 person, some of my attempts brought ppl here kept ppl here
So it is true that what we all do individually matters
@ArtBear@JonChevreau These are all about replacing existing established services. I don't think that's going to happen.
What's more likely are partnerships or convenants as I'm calling them between LinkedIn & Masto. Or Venmo & Masto.
The search thing is DOA. As I understand it, that's exactly what decentralization prevents. No master index. No comprehensive search even with agreement between instances. No complete statistical analysis. Especially not amongst the de-federated.
@ArtBear@JonChevreau I have coworkers that do social impact research & all got rocked by Elmo's Twitter API access shutdown so they now use the 'excessive scrolling' technique of scanning Twitter thru bots.
But their search reqs access to all posts & Mastodon's design conflicts w/ this.
Mastodon search as I understand it, is limited to hashtags & users who have intentionally enabled search for their posts. Putting aside post deletion, this makes search for academic purposes much less useful.
I am brainstorming partly about potential for Fedi as a publishing & communal ownership platform for journals in research, scientific, medical, technical & their peer review structures, without the gatekeeping & fees of many current setups.
@kurtsh@JonChevreau
Brainstorming a discrete user submitted Fedi link database project. Not the problematic search of the Fedi itself. But general weblinks knowledge etc.
In order to have a system that can't be so easily gamed. You serve people results based on stuff submitted by people they actually follow. Then 1 step removed, their follows choices of follows. And so on.
An opportunity for more authentic user curated links & knowledge.
@ArtBear@JonChevreau For example, we'll never know what's trending on the 2nd largest Mastodon instance that nobody wants to talk about - Pawoo.net - cuz they're allegedly populated by disgusting pediphiles & underage pr0n hustlers & everyone understandably can't de-federate from them fast enough.
@JonChevreau@ArtBear Yeah, this is the extremely large, disgusting black sheep of the Mastodon family that represents over a MILLION accounts, (the next closest thing to mastodon.social that exists) that Mastodonian's are happy to include in the growth & usage stats for Mastodon...
...but silently erase from any of the Fediverse star charts.
Truly the personification of the dark side of technological freedom & openness. 😞
Example #2: Gab is an extreme right/white supremecist collective & also one of the top 5 largest instances of Mastodon. Home to over 1.2M Neo-Nazis (that was in 2019; they supposedly grew by a 1M preceding Jan 6th) Gab is also a instance on the everyone-needs-to-block-these-MFers list.
The fact we do block those Pawoo, Gab, Truth Social, MF-ers, instead of invite them in to the Fedi to drive 'world-on-fire' levels of ad sales engagement, is a big part of the awesomeness of the Fedi.
What if Mastodon included an easy way to 'tip' someone?
Let's say someone creates a great piece of art & shares it with the community. If there was a built-in way within Mastodon profiles for everyone, in a single click, to be able to reliably send that person $1, greasing the wheels of financial support on Mastodon...
... imagine what that would do to attract creators & influencers? Right now, this is convoluted AF but Mastodon could standardize this.
What if Spnklr or HootSuite crossposted to Mastodon what they post to Twitter & also provided response mgmt & analytics?
Corp marketing orgs already using these social network tools could expand their presence to Mastodon with little increase in support. The tool would do all the work while expanding their analytics & process to Masto.
Start with OSS businesses & taste makers.
... imagine how this could drive brand recognition, usage & value?
@kurtsh@JonChevreau
Yes this would be great also. Both of these would help keep content creation high.
Content creation is really important to a network.
If we had, some implementation of channels or groups for masto & similar platforms, it would be very interesting to be able to voluntary submit some posts to Fedi subreddits for lack of a more correct term. Those subreddits could have moderation, topics, & user upvote/down for ordering in a more kbin lemmy fashion.
@ArtBear@JonChevreau Well, I get what your going for but there are no 'subreddits'.
The closest thing are Lists & those aren't even shareable with others to help connect new users with their 'people'... a very common complaint I've discovered about Mastodon.
I believe there are 'groups' as part of #activityPub protocol, I believe this is how Kbin magazines + Lemmy communities work. Also perhaps Firefish channels, although those don't federate beyond server yet
So potential scope to organise some post content in a more forum like fashion other than just via hashtags
Much as Kbin uses both APub notes (which I believe are what we call posts) & groups (which they call magazines)
Mastodon isn't about the numbers and who has the most, it is about the quality like @LexyCameron said.
Mastodon is great the way it is.
No Ads, no nutty billionaires in charge and we have the freedom to say whatever we want.
We also have the freedom to decide to listen to who we want, and block the ones we don't want in our feeds.
It's social media freedom..
I love Mastodon but I keep getting folks fingerwagging about "quantity vs quality" & these are the kinds of anecdotal, unquantifiable arguments I see from govt employees who don't like measurables & make excuses for missed deadlines & poor performance.
Twitter has 400M. Mastodon has 10M. If it's such 'high quality', where is everyone? Why are we losing active users, not gaining them?
I explicitly said "active users" because people are always hot to point at Twitter's quantity of dead or bot accounts so if we're talking about those individuals that are actively using a service, that's a race Mastodon is losing badly.
And it's likely because the value's simply not there in Mastodon to keep them, sadly.
I think the numbers on the graph aren't alarming. It takes a little time to get the hang of M, build up followers you want to hear from, find your niche. It's taken me almost a year.
Yes, it takes time to do a good job so to speak.
I am about the same in that respect, my feed is my niche and I don't care how many followers I have because my posts spread through mastodon.world and beyond.
I have met some wonderful people here that I never would of met otherwise, people from all over the world.
I would like to see a graph of how many ex-twit users have been blocked on here..😂 😂 😂
@LexyCameron@JonChevreau I'm not confusing anything. And as I've said repeatedly, to the "Well actually I like Mastodon so nyah" crowd, I'm not talking about your particular experience. I love Mastodon too but that's anecdotal & not relevant.
The success of a social network is proportional to its size. This is an axiom & hence the focus of my post. If you don't agree, I'll wish you the best, but my concern is that it seems obvious that there is no really driver for growth.
@JonChevreau@kurtsh Threads is a trash fire RN & maybe Facebook can get it under control, but their official app for threads is terrible (like all the “official” apps sadly2️⃣)
Other question, whether Threads follows through on the connecting ActivityPub,they do, they’re just a giant Mastodon instance1️⃣
Too soon. Mastodon has potential, as does BlueSky; I don’t see 🧵 becoming Twitter. I see Threads becoming “Facebook Chat” with news orgs and other places going there because it’s easy.
@JonChevreau@kurtsh 2️⃣ one thing that I talk about a lot in regards to Mastodon is how one of its potential strengths is the incredibly rich third-party app environment (particularly on IOS)
Want a simpler website for mastodon? Use Phanpy(web)
Want incredible levels of functions? Use Mona (iOS)
Want a colorful FUN interface? Use Toot! Or SoraSns (iOS)
But this is all Masto microstrategy. I'm trying to workshop the macro because it appears to be severely lacking for Masto with a lot of fluffy 'hope as a strategy' & zero planning/action.
@Wraithe@JonChevreau Comparing Instagram to Masto is Apples & Oranges. It's a photo site vs a microblogging service.
But I agree that Threads is awful: 100M growth & crap content moderation'll do that. But it has far more engagement than Masto's 23yrs.
Which is funny because in the next breath, Masto defenders happily tout how the Threads horror show plans to "extend Masto" over ActivityPub. Besides being contrary to the "we're a better experience" argument, I'll believe it when I see it.
@Wraithe@JonChevreau
Threads born 5mos ago: 24M active users
BlueSky born 2yrs ago: 2M users
Twitter born 18yrs ago: 200M active users
Mastodon born 7 yrs ago: 1.8M active users
Quantity is everything for social networks because added members increase diverse value & value is roughly exponential. This is a sociological axiom.
Quality doesn't scale & its value is linear at best. This is why the "Well, I like it here" crowd touting the "better experience" argument doesn't stick.
@kurtsh Not sure where you’re getting your timeline from. Mastodon was only created 7 years ago in late 2016.
Mastodon certainly built on the Fediverse, ActivityPub and other things that had been around far longer. But if you are comparing services in this way, Mastodon is only 7 years old.
@danyork@Wraithe@JonChevreau You're right. My bad. I had 2000 as the initial release date in my brain for some reason. Appreciate the cordial factcheck. All hail the Mastodon edit button.
@JonChevreau@kurtsh there is no good reason to be on multiple sites.. you are prolonging the war if you are. TS and Twitter are flat out NO, blue sky is just nouveau-twitter, and threads is another Zuckerberg project to maintain control and rake in more money by keeping people pissed off at each other.
@ShredderFeeder@JonChevreau I read Twitter weekly. It's the only place where companies, communities, local govt & key influencers post. I need it for my job & Mastodon don't have any of the same content unfortunately. If it's important, I repost the content on Masto.
My feed was intolerable until I started using "Control Panel for Twitter" to remove Twitter ads, reorder the timeline correctly & remove 'For you' & other annoying mandated features.
@kurtsh@JonChevreau it needs to die. I deleted my account a year ago and never looked back. And I find people who try to convince me it's still a viable place to do business annoying and pathetic. Desperately trying to hold onto the past. It's over. Go home. I feel like the only people who still use Twitter are closet racists who can't stand to be away from it for long.
@kurtsh@JonChevreau Seeing people get butt-hurt and block me because I called them out for defending the dying twitter is amazing.
Twitter is dying, and people coming to mastodon to defend twitter because they think livelihoods depend on it (instead of devoting all their effort to making their livlihood NOT depend on it is disingenuous at best.
Mastodon is a lot of things to a lot of people, one thing it isn't is a place to defend twitter.
Like the telecommunications, cable, radio, satellite & wireless industries, if we can't establish competition, fairplay & standards in the interest of citizens across social networks like we have with email... I cringe to say it but I think either govt engagement or heaven forbid, regulation is in order.
Mandatory govt adoption is less onerous. But that can't happen without an Enterprise class Mastodon.
@kurtsh Mastodon is what Twitter and other SM platforms should have been. I don’t believe it “missed the train” because it hasn’t (yet) attained explosive growth. Actually, I think it’s a good thing it hasn’t. Rapid growth ≠ a quality good or service. I’ve been on Mastodon for almost a year and have had more quality engagement and conversations than in over 13 years on the former bird site.
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