“Mastodon did not, and does not, have a unique selling point for most users” is a bit like saying “This park bench did not, and does not, have a unique selling point for most visitors.” just because it has a 10th of the number of people that use it as the one right next to the parking lot, even though it’s got a nicer view and is quieter and has much less litter surrounding it.

The rebuttal is frankly “So what?”. These migrations come in waves. The wave comes in, and the wave goes out. Some of the wave seeps in and sticks around. That’s the nature of these things.

Comparing fediverse sites to reddit and twitter is a fallacy and instead should be taken for what they are. I like the vibes on Beehaw. I like the vibes on my mastodon instance. I get to see the kind of content that I like to see and I don’t have big corpa algorithms trying to change my opinion or actively hide the content I DO like in favour of content that upsets me in the name of engagement.

I would call that a unique selling point. So maybe that’s another rebuttal. Op-ed person just wanted the fediverse experience to be something it wasn’t. They had expectations of the “migration” that weren’t met. But those are 100% their own problem and not an issue with the fediverse.

Migrating from Twitter and Facebook is much harder than migrating from Reddit. Twitter and Facebook have you follow mostly individuals, so if those individuals don’t all move at the same time to somewhere new, you never get the network effect. Whereas with Reddit, you follow topics. A list of topics can start small and grow with the community.

And you don’t need even .1% of the users of Reddit to make a good community. As a Reddit user of 16 years, I would argue that good communities actually only happen when they are smaller like what we have here now.

I see a lot of comments here saying that the vision of being “Mainstream” is not something Lemmy or other Fediverses try to achieve so they discard the feedback about UX or user comfort and discoverability because “we’re not trying to appeal to everyone or grow infinitely”.

And while I agree somewhat that “growth” is not the goal, I do feel like a lot of people here miss the point that “Being available to Mainstream users” is also greatly about diversity.

If the user experience and hurdles a user has to pass are great enough to filter only tech savvy or people who the issues with Reddit/Twitter are big enough to take action on, you self select to a very specific population.

You should try to help introduce diversity of people, and any user experience pitfalls and extra requirements reduce that diversity. If the “fediverse” want artists, zookeepers, woodworkers, small business owners, hobbyists, lawyers and many other people with views and interesting content to contribute this is a really bad hurdle.

Part of the reason why so many places of community that downplay user experience trend towards the same population of open source evangelists with the same form of discussion and “hivemind” that already exists in many iterations of this same experiment in the past.

I feel like that’s what the author is talking about more than “It needs to beat Twitter” when he’s talking about mainstream appeal, and anyone ignoring that is potentially dooming this or any other “let’s give people an open alternative to big platforms” to only serve their own specific subset of people and build another same-y echo chamber that could have been achieved using any self hosted forum system.

I know I’m a bit late to the party here with this comment, but I hope it someone helps change someone’s mind about downplaying the concerns raised in this post.

Mastodon did not, and does not, have a unique selling point for most users

The ability to follow and interact with content creators and users on a wide variety of platforms all from one account on one platform is something I can’t do on corporate social media. On Mastodon, I pull in dank photography from PixelFed, tech threads from Lemmy, text posts from Mastodon/Calckey/Akkoma, and video content from PeerTube. Contrasted with having to manage separate accounts and feeds for YouTube/Reddit/Twitter/Instagram, it’s way more convenient once you’re past the initial hump of setting up your feed (which does need UI/UX improvements).

Decentralization is not a selling point for 99% of people

I mean, true. I’ve never heard any non-tech person be super hype about how email is decentralized and that they can host their own email server. They mostly just like that they don’t have to produce a physical letter, mail it, then wait for it to be delivered. They should care that some rich prick can just buy their social media site of choice and run it straight into the ground, but convenience and functionality matter more to them.

Most people don’t give a thruppenny fuck about their freedom to view and edit the source code of the software they use, which they would not know how to do even if they cared

They should, considering that even if they can’t do it personally, this means that other people who can have the ability to add any desired functionality and ship it out for them to use.

Most people are not ideologically opposed to the notion of proprietary software and cannot be convinced to be because it is simply not important to them and cannot be explained in terms that are important to them

They should, since companies are routinely putting them through the ringer and have no incentives to stop otherwise.

When given the choice between a tool that is immediately useful for achieving some sort of goal but conflicts with some kind of ideological standpoint and a tool that is not as useful but they agree with ideologically, they will probably choose the former

Only an issue when FOSS alternatives don’t achieve feature-parity, so we should make sure that our stuff is on point.

Decentralization makes the user experience worse

Eh, not really. The bigger issue is that the Fediverse platforms copied the design of centralized platforms for the most part without adequately adjusting for the different UX that a decentralized federated system provides. Some things I think should be standard that currently aren’t:

1. I want to be able to send search queries to other instances from my instance and have the results displayed back to me.
2. I want to be able to browse the timelines of other instances from mine.
3. PeerTube has a “remote subscribe” option where you fill in a little box with your @username@domain and it’ll open a window on your instance where you can follow the channel; I think this should be polished and then it’d be great.
4. Every platform should support hashtags and instances should be aware of each other’s hashtag usage so the search can be smart and recommend sending queries to instances where the hashtag you’re looking up is most commonly used.

I don’t think this is a fundamental problem with decentralization, but rather the implementation just needs some work. I think the above 4 tweaks would fix a lot of issues.

As a brief explainer (without wanting to turn this into yet another technical explanation of the fediverse), if you start up a fresh new Mastodon instance, it will see no posts. Its “federated feed” will be blank, the search will not find anything, searches for hashtags will show nothing, and it will ingest no posts from other servers. For the instance to start seeing posts, you must follow people.

.

Either way, an instance will then only see the new posts of people who someone on the instance is following. This means that the more people on the server, with the more diverse follow lists, the better things work; the more hashtags will get useful results, the more the federated feed becomes useful as a means of discovery. Conversely, if you are the only user—of one of only a few users—on your instance, your federated feed will just be basically your follow list, so your means of discovery is limited to things your followers boost.

This means that for new users to Mastodon, objectively the best experience is delivered by joining a big instance, e.g., Mastodon.social. .social’s large user base means that its users follow more accounts on more instances than any other, which means it sees more posts than any other, which means new users have a rich source of other users and posts to find and follow, and thus infinitely better discovery options.

However, new users are also encouraged to join small instances and often explicitly not to join Mastodon.social, typically in service of avoiding centralization and pursuing a properly decentralized fediverse. Sometimes this works, in that the user joins a smaller instance that is still reasonably active and has enough active users following enough active users. Often it doesn’t. Often users get frustrated and leave because they’re not seeing any posts that they’ve not seen before, but if they were on .social or another massive server, they’d be seeing all sorts of content and have a reason to stick around.

This is actually a solved issue via relays. Small instances should set up a few to get a content stream going.

The people who accept these trade-offs are not normal, and they’re in charge

Hey, when you give users control of their own destiny and the freedom to mold it how they want, it’ll reflect their priorities. The Fediverse is no exception.

Mastodon doesn’t scale well, and its user base accepts no funding model other than charity

By design. We’re here because we’re fleeing monolithic sites with so much traffic that content moderation is a nightmare and that funding models basically guarantee enshittification. If you don’t like that, then the Fediverse isn’t for you.

But the reality is that all blocking Threads will do is cut the fediverse off from its most significant expansion possible.

Yeah, gonna be honest, not really interested in appealing to Meta chuds for growth at all costs.

In no small part, Mastodon’s culture is exclusionary

All of the above is tolerable if you want to keep Mastodon/fedi as a niche interest platform for people with niche interests, run for fun and/or based on the goodness of peoples’ hearts. Or if, conversely, you want to make the learning curve deliberately hard and the UX deliberately obtuse so that only the people willing to put up with all manner of bullshit bother to stick around (what I’d like to call the “Arch Linux approach to community building”). It is, however, completely incompatible with mainstream adoption.

True, but also not a bad thing. Not everything needs to be for everyone. The Fediverse can be for people who are tired of corporate control over their internet socializing and the people who don’t give a shit can just stay on Twitter while Melonbawler makes it easier for chuds to recruit and whatnot.

As for whether or not the migration panned out, well, Twitter isn’t dead, but Mastodon and the Fediverse still have millions more users than it did prior to the migration and the MAU count has stabilized 8 months later, so I’d still call that a dub.

I mean, to me, it sounds like it was written by someone who doesn’t deal with marginalisation in any real way. No unique selling point? The fact I can exist here without being constantly harassed by bigots that have a green light from a mega social media platform that doesn’t give a shit about me is a pretty strong selling point. Strong enough that having experienced it, I will never return to a centralised social media platform that isn’t aggressively supportive of minority rights.

Ah yes, another tech person who says the fediverse is dead. And yet we continue to grow

Sorry, I couldn’t read this all the way through. All I hear that author saying is various capitalist-mindset “if it won’t serve everyone and won’t ever become a monopoly that crushes competitors, it’s not worth doing” b.s.

It’s perfectly fine that the Fediverse isn’t the best option for everyone! Geeze!

It panned out for me. I used to check Twitter everyday, but now I haven’t even looked at it in weeks. The Fediverse is the healthier alternative that’s better for me, better for the internet, and better for society in general.

I’m kinda pissy cause the guy never even responded to being made aware of data like this and that
(i feel confident that he saw my comment cause he replied directly at my first one in the thread)

Does the fediverse need to consume all of the traffic that’s currently directed at other platforms? I think the best thing about the Fediverse is that it provides more options for online social spaces.

If I don’t like Twitter I can try something else. If I don’t like Reddit I can go elsewhere. It doesn’t have to be the exact same thing as those services, as long as it provides me an enjoyable way to consume information in my free time.

I don’t feel like the goal is to absorb all of the traffic from every other site though? Or if it is that seems misguided.

I’m very much enjoying my time on Kbin, even if it is janky and new and imperfect. All of that is actually kind of refreshing

yeah, i agree with the OP. decentralized networks have a hump thats hard to smooth out, and activitypub isnt the best protocol in the furst place.

Nailed it.

Then there’s the absolutely abysmal UX of following someone who exists on another Mastodon instance when you’re linked to their profile, which involves the non-obvious steps of manually copying and pasting a URL into a search box on your home instance, waiting for a connection to be made, then following them, at which point you won’t see any of their old posts, just their new ones. Compare and contrast with Twitter’s handling, which is where you search for a username and can see all their posts and can follow them without having to manually copy and paste a single damn thing.

seems like the author is frustrated that a place where the 1% of people who care about freedom over inconvenience cares more about freedom than the user experience of the 99%

its not like the poor user experience or being against joining large instances are to satisfy some egotistical whim. decentralization is hard, the fediverse still a work-in-progress and upcoming solutions (nomadic identities) would likely not be well received either

Mastodon’s biggest detriment is it’s creator

The Fediverse as a whole has a lot to offer There just is not one unified voice for it and some find the concept hard to understand or follow Maybe if there was a Fediverse Foundation

I mean it’s hard to argue this isn’t true. Mastodon (and Lemmy) have a fraction of the userbase of Twitter (and Reddit).

I want to think that Lemmy will be immune to this to some extent compared to Mastodon, since I think personally Twitter-style engagement is worse and less interesting than Reddit-style engagement.

But the author does address this point a little bit:

We are, however, getting something of a repeat of this with Reddit’s current brouhaha over API changes, only this time with the mooted alternative being Lemmy and, more specifically, Kbin.social. The latter has already avoided a lot of the above pitfalls and is growing quite nicely, but the worry from my side is that the same purism and proselytization about decentralizing everything will eventually bugger up the #RedditMigration exactly as it did the #TwitterMigration.

In truth, I don’t think these things are truly fixable. The decentralized nature of the network introduces inherent issues and trade-offs that ruin the end user experience, and the people who are by and large responsible for anything that might ameliorate those trade-offs are also the people who are least likely to perceive an issue with them. Mainstream adoption as such is not really possible without pissing off a lot of the people who have made Mastodon their home, or at least getting those people to make some compromises they will not want to make. If they don’t want to, that’s fine, but that will have to come at the same time alongside it remaining an obscure, niche network.

The rebuttal I would offer is that if people create higher-quality content and higher-quality communities in Lemmy, then I think people will continue aggregating into it. There’s nothing special about Reddit per se; it started at nowhere too. And there are a ton of subs that required really strict ideological purity so that isn’t a fediverse-exclusive problem either.

Still, I think the article is largely correct about Mastodon, and that it’s reasonable to be concerned for Lemmy.