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Many People Aren't Sticking Around Mastodon (theguardian.com) 160

Posted by BeauHD from the losing-steam dept.
The number of active users on the Mastodon social network has dropped more than 30% since the peak and is continuing a slow decline, according to the latest data posted on its website. There were about 1.8 million active users in the first week of January, down from over 2.5 million in early December. The Guardian reports: Mastodon, an open-source network of largely independently hosted servers, has often been touted as an alternative to Twitter. And its growth appears connected to controversies at Twitter. But for many it doesn't fulfill the role that Twitter did and experts say it may be too complicated to really replace it. [...]

There were about 500,000 active Mastodon users before Elon Musk took control of Twitter at the end of October. By mid-November, that number climbed to almost 2 million active users. [...] The surge in new Mastodon users continued throughout November, peaking at over 130,000 new users a day. The upticks often coincided with controversial decisions made by Elon Musk. Data from Google suggests there was also a surge in searches for Mastodon in April 2022, around the time Musk announced he had become Twitter's largest shareholder.

"Twitter, in its most basic form is simple," Meg Coffey, a social media strategist, said. "You can open up an app or open up a website, type some words, and you're done. I mean, it was [a] basic SMS platform." For many, Mastodon may have proved too hard to port over their communities and was just too complicated. Some may have gone back to Twitter, while others, said Coffey, may have dropped social media entirely. "Everybody went and signed up [on Mastodon] and realized how hard it was, and then got back on Twitter and were like, 'Oh, that's, that's hard. Maybe we won't go there,'" she said. "It's like the people that said 'I'm moving to Canada' when Donald Trump was elected," Coffey added. "They never actually moved to Canada."
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Many People Aren't Sticking Around Mastodon More

Many People Aren't Sticking Around Mastodon

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  • FFS (Score:5, Insightful)

    by zshXx ( 7123425 ) on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @09:05PM (#63197786)
    It's called mastodon. Maybe start with fixing name.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @09:08PM (#63197800)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Pablonius Monk ( 1555879 )
      I find Mastodon to be an absolute breath of fresh air. There's LOTS more engagement and it's friendly. It's the Canada of social networks! There do seem to be a lot of folks who signed up during the recent Great Twitter Migration and have never posted. For years I tried Twitter. It was fun to read during big sporting events and such. But ultimately it wasn't particularly rewarding. And it always felt like being at a fancy aquarium. "You can look, but please don't knock on the glass." Being on Mastodon now

    • It sounds like much of your life is consumed by social media. That can't be healthy.

    • It's more than it seems (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @10:46PM (#63197938)

      First, It's hardly "most people" if it's dropped 30% after jumping by 3-400%.

      Remember that the percentage move of 400% higher, was from a fairly low number... while the 30% move is starting from a much higher point.

      Let's say Mastodon started with 10 people (just keeping numbers simple, obv they have way more, don't get offended). A 400% gain gives you 50 people.

      Now let's take away 30%. That is 15 people! That is not a tiny number out of 50, leaving you with 35...

      The real question though is if this is a one time thing, or a trend.

      My own personal experience with Mastodon is trying to switch to it long ago, before all these hipsters tried to hang out there. I just didn't like it. I don't like the UI, the federation in practice is annoying, I thought it was too technical a space even for me, a software developer... I really am pretty surprised the drop is that low, and kind of expect it to accelerate. And really the final straw is "toots" for the mainstream. Yeah I know they tried to retire it but it seems a bit late.

      I just do not think people will find what they are looking for on Mastodon, especially since some switched expecting Twitter to die at any second which obviously did not and will not happen (handling World Cup traffic alone was the final nail in that coffin).

      • Re:It's more than it seems (Score:5, Insightful)

        by AleRunner ( 4556245 ) on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @02:04AM (#63198156)

        My own personal experience with Mastodon is trying to switch to it long ago, before all these hipsters tried to hang out there. I just didn't like it. I don't like the UI, the federation in practice is annoying, I thought it was too technical a space even for me, a software developer... I really am pretty surprised the drop is that low, and kind of expect it to accelerate.

        This really seems to me to be the big thing. The level of user experience. I did join and I started trying to find stuff. When I wanted to follow something on a remote server I had to cut and paste a URL. Surely that's something that could just be a single button click? I'm guessing that the fact that you don't see mastodon embedded in other pages is similar. In twitter it will be a single click type thing and in mastodon probably needs much more understanding?

      • By your own example, they still increased 350%

    • Re:Nope. (Score:5, Informative)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @10:48PM (#63197942) Homepage Journal

      Kind of the whole point of Mastodon is that it's not Twitter. Being used by the same people in the same way would not be success.

      Twitter's business model isn't built on serving its users, it's built on serving them up to advertisers. Twitter wastes your time by design. That's called "engagement" a marvelously inhumane success metric that covers everything from swapping recipes to doomscrolling and cyberstalking. Twitter is to social interaction what Cheetohs are to nutrition. The whole point of Cheetohs is that unlike real food, they will never satisfy you.

      I actually *do* enjoy certain aspects of social media; keeping up with old schoolmates and colleagues, sharing plans and pictures with family. What I don't enjoy is social media's incessant attempts to draw me into flamewars with people I don't know or to dump me in algorithmically selected clickbait rabbit holes. I rather *like* the fact that Mastodon doesn't even have a place in its interface for "trending". It just shows me the people and hashtags I'm actually following. It's actually designed to serve its users' needs.

      Mastodon can't replace Twitter without promoting the same kind of mindlessly addictive behavior Twitter does. But if that's what you *want*, well, just use Twitter. It doesn't really matter which sociopath is running the company; the entire enterprise is sociopathic.

      • Twitter's business model isn't built on serving its users, it's built on serving them up to advertisers.

        Given Twitters history of quarterly profit announcements I'd argue their business model is built on hopes and dreams that one day they can figure out a viable business model.

      • Federated stuff have very legal advantages

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        "Mastodon can't replace Twitter without promoting the same kind of mindlessly addictive behavior Twitter does. But if that's what you *want*, well, just use Twitter. It doesn't really matter which sociopath is running the company; the entire enterprise is sociopathic."

        Perfect and, for sociopathic people, increasingly sociopathic management is a feature.

        Twitter needs to be destroyed, not replaced. There's a reason Musk wanted greater control over it, a reason he's not interested in being public.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Exactly.

        Twitter is a commercial social network whose purpose is to intentionally get people to view ads and stay on the site. And they do that using the algorithm - getting people worked up to retweet whatever idiotic thing they heard about is the whole point. Just get their first innate reaction and move on.

        Mastodon is the opposite - its purpose is to communicate, so it's going to serve up communications and communities that you want to engage in and contribute to. If you have a question, you ask it, and s

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I'd use Mastodon more if there was a mobile client or web client that let me use both it and Twitter at the same time. Post to both, read both.

      • Good luck with that .. It's unlikely to happen as the people running the servers on both systems do not want you to ...

        One because it will drag people away, and the other because they left for a reason

      • I'm not sure about cross-posting, but AndStatus [github.com] can combine feeds from Twitter and Mastodon (and a few others). I haven't used it myself, but it's been around a while.

    • Imagine if Canada's population quadrupled, then fell by 30% after a few months.

      That Coffey isn't able to see that, suggests wishful thinking on their part.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      First, It's hardly "most people" if it's dropped 30% after jumping by 3-400%.

      Secondly what's happened is the massive growth line has straightened out, which means the "People who joined for five minutes and then decided it wasn't for them" factor is finally appearing, a month behind in the stats because the stats can't really figure out who's active and who isn't on the basis of five minutes of usage, and because the massive increases were hiding those who were leaving.

      What I expect, assuming Musk doesn't do another massive fuck up with Twitter, is for the line to curve back up, but much, much, more slowly, by the end of this month.

      Mastodon's doing well. I'm on it, I'm literally flooded with so many posts at the moment I'm about to start pruning my follow list, and it's still only half the length of my old follow list on Twitter, where I never felt I had to prune.

      (And I'm not even on a main server, I set up my own. Which means my data is my own. You should too. It's social networking without people sucking down your data and trying to monetize it by selling it to groups who want to use social media to get people to kill each other. It's genuinely much more pleasant, people are actually nice to one another. Who knew that was possible?)

      Beyond that you're getting a whole bunch of people realising they don't need either Twitter or Mastodon and just getting on with other things in their lives. It just took Musk breaking the back of Twitter for a lot of people to realise how little they got out of it.

  • The latter (Score:3, Informative)

    by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @09:16PM (#63197814)
    Mastodon was kinda clunky, and the server setup was just odd. I'm still subscribed, but don't go there much.

    But I didn't re-subscribe to Twitter. At first, watching Musk's mental state deteriorating was kind of funny, but now it's just sad.

    • Re:The latter (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Joce640k ( 829181 ) on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @09:24PM (#63197834) Homepage

      But I didn't re-subscribe to Twitter. At first, watching Musk's mental state deteriorating was kind of funny, but now it's just sad.

      What exactly did you used to do on Twitter that you can't do any more?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mjwx ( 966435 )

        But I didn't re-subscribe to Twitter. At first, watching Musk's mental state deteriorating was kind of funny, but now it's just sad.

        What exactly did you used to do on Twitter that you can't do any more?

        And there in lies the problem.

        People are realising they never got much off of twitter in the first place. So they've left Twitter, didn't find much on Mastodon and realised that they didn't find that much interesting on Twitter before hand and not bothered going back.

        However I suspect this is more a case of a number of people who signed up to see what it was all about and just didn't go back, like the people who join gyms every January, clog the car park for a few weeks and stop going.

    • Oh c'mon, you can't tell me you're not having a popcorn moment every time the oversized Richy Rich throws another tantrum.

      • Oh c'mon, you can't tell me you're not having a popcorn moment every time the oversized Richy Rich throws another tantrum.

        Well, I'm sad, but it doesn't last long. But the lad needs some intervention. When you start trying to make twitter profitble by not paying your bills, there's some noggin problems a-happening.

        I wonder how they keep him under control at Spacex? The Starship (or what I call the N1 reboot) is becoming a bit of an Ol Muskie shitshow, but there appear to be portions of the company that don't show his talent for screwing things up.

        Or is the Starship the 21st century Spruce Goose?

    • I'm addicted to mastodon (and using twitter less and less, day to day, in direction to abandon it)

  • Mastodon isn't for everybody (Score:3)

    by linuxguy ( 98493 ) on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @09:24PM (#63197832) Homepage
    Yes, the name is quirky. And having to find the right servers to connect to is a hurdle for many. And because of its distributed architecture, many of the features that Twitter has, are difficult, if not impossible to support on Mastodon.

    I have, for now, given up on social media thing. And I am discovering that I am much better off for it. I am assuming Slashdot is not considered social media. Side question. What is a cool category name for dying websites that old timers refuse to give up?

  • The problem is a lack of content (Score:3, Informative)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @09:42PM (#63197860)
    To draw average people. It security people and a bunch of scientists are all over it. But there aren't any famous stars posting gossip to attract your average people. There's nothing there to attract content providers and at the end of the day people show up to Twitter to consume content. I wouldn't exactly call it good content but it's still content.

    You would need some major people to flee Twitter to really see another social network pick up from them. Other than that or a total collapse of Twitter that's probably coming due to finances. I doubt anyone is going to keep pouring money into Twitter and the advertisers are unlikely to come back. One of the major problems you have when you chase your advertisers off is that online advertising doesn't work and when they pause their ad campaigns for any length of time it becomes real obvious that it doesn't work.

    It took YouTube close to 5 years to recover from the Adpocalypse when a bunch of Coca-Cola ads showed up on Nazi videos and the advertisers got spooked and left. Even now they never fully recovered in a large amount of the advertisements are either political, scams, or generic branding emails. That and taco bell. Dear God Taco Bell advertises a lot on YouTube. But mcdonald's? Not so much. Heck even Coca-Cola isn't bothering anymore.

    Twitter needs about five or six years to recover and for the advertisers to forget how useless it is. But I don't think a company losing over a billion dollars a year has that long to live

    • I doubt anyone is going to keep pouring money into Twitter and the advertisers are unlikely to come back.

      Most advertisers are back (Apple is back for example). a lot of them came back when they realized Twitter is actually doing something about child porn which it wasn't before. It's actually a safer realm to present advertisements now and has more people using it than before.

      There is a lot of fantasy notion that Twitter is going to expire any day now for all sorts of reasons, but in the end every reason h

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by narcc ( 412956 )

        Apple is advertising on the world's largest white supremacist / anti-vax / conspiracy theory noise machine? That's just one more reason to never buy Apple crap.

        Keep in shilling for sociopathic billionaires, Kendall. I'm sure they've noticed your endless supportive posts and think you're super cool...

      • "Elon Musk fans claim he's eliminated child abuse material on Twitter - experts say otherwise"

        https://www.dailydot.com/debug... [dailydot.com]

      • Apple never truly left ... they just scaled back a bit ...

        Twitter Adverts are a very minor part of their advertising budget .. and insignificant to them as a whole ...
        The Myth is that Twitter is huge and influential ... it's relatively small, and some of it's user shout very loudly...

  • Post.News IS growing though (Score:3, Informative)

    by Glasswire ( 302197 ) on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @09:45PM (#63197864) Homepage

    Post [post.news] is growing dramatically as the new alternative for Twitter refugees.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ediron2 ( 246908 )

      Yay, you've gone from being a commodity mined by Twitter to a commodity being mined by Post.

  • Virtue signaling needs an audience (Score:4, Insightful)

    by klipclop ( 6724090 ) on Tuesday January 10, 2023 @10:27PM (#63197926)
    So they returned to twitter once they realized that they aren't the party

  • "It's like the people that said 'I'm moving to Canada' when Donald Trump was elected," Coffey added. "They never actually moved to Canada."

    More like alcoholics who finally got to the AA meeting, but fell off the wagon again..

  • Having sworn with the new year to stop their addictive behavior, many return to Twitter.

    They'd never really stopped drinking and doping, so no real change there, lol.

  • There's no bad awareness raise: it's advertising
  • sounds like a twisted portmanteau of "masturbate" and "sodomy", which is probably apt

  • Mastodon seems like a reasonable alternative to Twitter for those folks who cannot stomach any diversity in their social media feeds. I'm not entirely sure why elements of the tech community are so bent on serving that niche, though.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      "By "stomach ... diversity" do you mean tolerate exploitation of social media as a propaganda tool?

      "I'm not entirely sure why elements of the tech community are so bent on serving that niche, though."

      You mean serving the "niche" of trying to provide what people want?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mrex ( 25183 )

        "By "stomach ... diversity" do you mean tolerate exploitation of social media as a propaganda tool?

        No, I don't. They all tolerate that. Slashdot is awash in it, and you're here!

  • Lazy Journalists don't like it ... (Score:3)

    by JasterBobaMereel ( 1102861 ) on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @07:50AM (#63198664)

    Because they can't mine stories as easily ...

    But the growth is steady with a few people joining, seeing it's not for them and leaving, and a few making accounts on multiple servers rather than moving them....

    All the complaints I have heard boil own to "it's not like Twitter" ... than the whole point is it's not like Twitter ..

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      Yep, it's conspicuous what journalists say about Twitter. They need it and spend a great deal of time on it. Why? Because they get a lot of professional benefit. That alone tells you what Twitter's true nature is. It is not "social" media, it is propaganda; it is not where people talk, it's where manipulation of the public happens.

  • of course they aren't (Score:4, Insightful)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @08:18AM (#63198736) Journal

    ...these are pretty much the same period that insisted they'd move to Canada if Trump won.
    Or if any Republican candidate won any presidential election since Clinton.

    Somehow, they're all still here.

  • Webrings (Score:3)

    by byronivs ( 1626319 ) on Wednesday January 11, 2023 @10:32AM (#63199102) Journal
    Clearly the answer is webrings.
  • IMHO, the people that are likely leaving Mastodon are exactly the ones that we really don't want there anyhow. That is, all that is twitter trash today. So, please. Please, just go. Take your hate speech and "ads", etc to twitter. Nuff said.

  • As with any revolution, rebellion, or resistance, if there isn't a good enough replacement to the leader being overthrown, people just fall back in line with whatever egotistical dominator is willing to claim leadership.

    Ya, people ran away from Twitter because Musk's douche-baggery, but there is no functional alternative to Twitter... so they'll end up crawling back (just not advertising that they're doing so).

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