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The Mastodon Bump Is Now a Slump (wired.com) 100

Posted by msmash from the tough-luck dept.
The fall in Mastodon's popularity suggests the decentralized platform is not a replacement for mainstream services. An anonymous reader shares a report: Twitter users put Mastodon usernames in their handles and trumpeted their migration. The new traffic knocked many Mastodon instances, or servers, offline. In less than two months, Mastodon's monthly active users climbed from 380,000 to more than 2.5 million. But not everyone stuck around. Mastodon's active monthly user count dropped to 1.4 million by late January. It now has nearly half a million fewer total registered users than at the start of the year. Many newcomers have complained that Mastodon is hard to use.
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The Mastodon Bump Is Now a Slump More

The Mastodon Bump Is Now a Slump

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  • And there it is - This stuff needs to be idiot proof. If you can't just signup and go, average joes won't bother.

    • Re:"Mastodon is hard to use" (Score:4, Funny)

      by know-nothing cunt ( 6546228 ) on Monday February 13, 2023 @12:34PM (#63289797)

      You're absolutely right. I simply couldn't tell where to begin [mastodon.com].

    • It is difficult to use and there isn't much incentive to learn, since almost all of the Twitter influx also remained on Twitter. But Mastodon has many more users and much more mindshare than before He Who Shall Not Be Shadowbanned took over. Since Twitter is struggling financially, we should be happy that there is an open-source alternative.

      • You are deeply mistaken, Frank. The Twitter management was a hivemind that worked with the DNC and later the Biden Administration to censor their political opponents. This is against what the First Amendment stated. It's good that Musk got rid of this. Also, in regards to this post you made: https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... [slashdot.org] You demonstrated the fallacy of an ad hominem attack: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.c... [yourlogicalfallacyis.com] It's also an example of presentism: you made a judgement of a historical figure using today's

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      People left Twitter because Elon Musk is a gigantic assclown, and a few months later they realized 2 things:

      Mastodon is amateur crap
      Twitter still works the same as it always has, despite Elon Musk's assclownery

      • No to both. Mastodon actually has some extra features that twitter doesn't, and is pretty full-featured. Meanwhile, Twitter is breaking in some serious ways, all third party apps are broken and 2FA was broken for a while as well as outages.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by RoccamOccam ( 953524 )
        Leftiests joined Mastodon because they hoped to replicate their early success in creating a major social media platform where they secretly censored conservatives.

    • Re:"Mastodon is hard to use" (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AleRunner ( 4556245 ) on Monday February 13, 2023 @02:28PM (#63290049)

      For twitter, the standard to follow someone is to click a link. For mastodon, if they aren't on your server, then the standard is to cut and paste a link from one place to another. It probably takes about 20-100 times as long to do,. If your actual job is working on social media, for example, hypothetically, trying to get attention to missing children so that people know if they spot them in the street, that would translate to doing some small fraction of what you would do otherwise. In other words you would save only 1/20th of the number of children.

      If mastodon is to be the standard for everyone then it needs to solve problems like that. There must be a solution, for example allowing servers to learn about each other, or store a cookie remembering where the user's home server is and, when it's available just automatically sorting out the follow.

      • There must be a solution, for example allowing servers to learn about each other, or store a cookie remembering where the user's home server is and, when it's available just automatically sorting out the follow.

        You mean it can't do that? Mastodon is supposed to be a federated service. Wheretf is the federation if it can't even do something as dirt simple as keep track of your home server for you?

        • Mastodon has federated content. Users are on their own servers, but you can share stuff from other servers, and contact users on other servers. You can also interact with content with any other website that supports ActivityPub, which can be had through a CMS. For example, there exists an ActivityPub module for Drupal [drupal.org].

          • I think Areyoukiddingme is referring to the fact that there's no way for other instances' web front ends to know what your home instance is. If another instance knew your home instance, it could redirect you there to finish the interaction. But because the other instance can't see your home instance's cookies (which is a good thing in general for the sake of privacy), it doesn't know where to redirect you.

            I know of two workarounds.
            A. On desktop, install an extension such as Mastodon Simplified Federation [mozilla.org] in

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by zuki ( 845560 )

        For twitter, the standard to follow someone is to click a link. For mastodon, if they aren't on your server, then the standard is to cut and paste a link from one place to another. It probably takes about 20-100 times as long to do....

        There are several tools and extensions available that address this particular issue you raised. For example FediAct [github.com], which is available for both Firefox and Chrome.

        Learning to customize and get the most out of Mastodon does require extra work for sure, hopefully some slick new clients for mobile platforms are emerging like Ivory (iOS) [tapbots.com]; and obviously newcomers will still need to make the effort to understand the new paradigms of the Fediverse.

        But overall - and even if the market share never rises above t

    • I tried to use it and I literally could not figure it out. And I'm definitely a computer nerd.

      Twitter is not a very complex thing. It should be easy to replicate. Worrying about being distributed is premature.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I tried to use it and I literally could not figure it out. And I'm definitely a computer nerd.

        You post to mastodon by performing, quite literally, the steps you took to post here to slashdot.

        Your username to copy/paste to others is on the top left of the screen in mastodon and on the top right on slashdot.

        So you just claimed slashdot posts are too hard to use, you could not figure it out, yet somehow managed to do it...

      • Besides choosing a server ... it's exactly as hard to use as Twitter ...

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • It's almost like the average Twitter twit doesn't want to start up their own chat server and go through the hassle of federating with peers, or finding one that already exists and doesn't have terrible performance due to Mastodon not being built to scale to hundreds of thousands of users per service node.

    As it turns out, all those engineers that left Twitter by choice (or not) may have actually served a purpose - making a platform that can actually work at the scale requested.

    • As it turns out, all those engineers that left Twitter by choice (or not) may have actually served a purpose - making a platform that can actually work at the scale requested.

      You're right. They went to Mastodon [macaw.social].

    • Well, or the article is bull.. Mastodon stil saw a 400% increase in usage, just not the 1000% increase earlier. So a lot of people transitioned just fine, and gave Mastodon unparalleled growth.

  • I tried Mastodon many years ago, long before the current wave.

    I like the idea of federated services but in practice, all of the servers made for a mess.

    I know efforts are being made to put a better UI on top of this by a number of companies but the whole thing is fundamentally more complex in a way that I feel is too technical for most people and they will always hit some kind of breaking point.

    Probably the recent increase has helped improve the user base of Mastodon in terms of quality of people there, but

  • Remember in the 90's after Geraldo got his nose broken after he had some Black Panthers and Neo Nazi's on his show (OK I probably have the groups wrong, but close enough)

    After that drama, ALL the talk shows got into the daytime talk show trash drama. It got really bad. You think Dr. Phil exploited people, 90's talk shows made Phil look TAME by comparison. Morton Downey's show by far was the trashiest. Phil Donohue played up the naïve old man. It spawned Jerry Springer. Even Ophra tried to get in o

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by narcc ( 412956 )

      Have you seen twitter lately? It's rapidly devolving into an insane mess of conspiracy theories and misinformation.

      It's been shot in the gut. Its death with be slow and painful.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by t0qer ( 230538 )

        Did you see Geocities? It was chock full of equally insane and shocking conspiracy theories, misinformation. People for the most part said, "Oh, Geocities, it's a hive of scum and villany and animated GIF's, we must be careful"

        What's wrong with the same being said about Twitter? Was Twitter supposed to be "The One" like Neo from the Matrix? Am I missing something here?

        The internet will always be like this, things will become cool. People will start using said cool thing. Then thing will become not s

        • What's wrong with the same being said about Twitter?

          From the user's standpoint? Maybe nothing, maybe everything, depending on what they want personally.

          From the advertisers' standpoint? Everything, which is why Twitter keeps having to reimplement the same stuff Elon said he was going to get rid of.

          Twitter is a business, remember? If Elon doesn't pander to advertisers then it will die.

      • So it's been like that since 2009 when I left Twitter. What about now?
  • There's a new kid on the block that's more private and tamper-resistant than Mastadon and nearly as complicated to use. But they are trying really hard to see if it can be made easier to use... The only thing clear right now is that Mastadon is not the future of FOSS Twitter alternatives.

    • The Nostr protocol site does a good job describing why Mastodon isn't a good Twitter replacement.
      They're pointing in the right direction.

    • Mastodon is not trying to replace Twitter ...

      Just because people who don't use it keep trying to compare it to twitter does not mean it is ...

  • So what? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dmay34 ( 6770232 ) on Monday February 13, 2023 @12:45PM (#63289855)

    The point of social media shouldn't be to create a brand and have your hot takes go "viral". Twitter taught people the exact opposite, that "you can get super popular with complete strangers if you donate every waking hour to looking at our ads and providing us with free content." That's really stupid, and kind of pathetic.

    Mastodon is designed around building a small community of people you like to talk to. It's not made to "build a brand" and is really bad at that.

  • It's like any new service that is better than a previous service. If you can't reach critical mass of users, it doesn't matter how good it is.

    People don't care about the table that they are eating dinner at. They care about the other people around the table.

    Twitter's table is a little shaky, but they keep wedging things under the feet to level it. Until a critical mass of people get tired of shoving something under the table feet to keep it stable, people aren't going to switch.

    And Mastodon isn't a perfect

  • Twitter engagement still high (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jacks smirking reven ( 909048 ) on Monday February 13, 2023 @12:57PM (#63289887)

    As long as that remains the case all the alternatives will continue to languish.

    Love him or hate him fact is even with all the layoffs and somewhat confusing changes as we sit right now Twitter is working just fine and engagement on the platform is still very good if not better than before. High engagement means advertisers will still use the platform and users will still post there as that's where the "action" is.

    Until something real bad happens Twitter will remain the platform to beat. Maybe that does happen over the rest of the year but Musk's shitposting will have to take a real dark turn for it to crash the platform to users and advertisers.

  • "It now has nearly half a million fewer total registered users than at the start of the year."

    People actually explicitly terminated their accounts?

    That's in the category of stuff nobody does. Ever. Not unless they really REALLY are quitting and want to make a point of it...like, say, leaving Twitter because of Musk (or Trump) or leaving Facebook...i mean, even those leaving Facebook tend to keep their account alive but unused/disabled for a time.

    How many of us still have a MySpace? Did you really turn it of

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by acroyear ( 5882 )

      (I can see it if a mod opted to remove an unused account to save resources, but I still don't see half a million of that, in only 6 weeks, without some bot software to make such a thing easy to do and a LOT of admins making the choice to do that purge.)

    • The number of registered accounts has continued to go up ... currently at 9,462,826

      The number of active accounts is impossible to monitor as it's a distributed network

    • Perhaps those were accounts removed because they belonged to bots or something. People don't bother to remove accounts unless they're really angry, not just bored

  • Certain people got censored on Twitter.

    The other people said "Go make your own Twitter"

    Enter Parler.

    Parler got hacked/doxxed and otherwise failed to gain traction.

    Twitter gets acquired and certain people come back to it.

    The other people said "Fine, we're leaving Twitter."

    Enter Mastodon.

    Mastodon is not easy to use, losing traction.

    Well well well. I guess it's back over to Twitter.

  • For many, signup to mastodon was clearly just another exercise in virtue signalling and flounce rather than any earnest intention to use the new platform. Hopefully some of them have managed escaped the garbage realm of social media altogether. They may inadvertently regain their sanity.

    • It is more like:
      * you sign up and are in a desert: you know no one and have no easy means to find your friends

      I use Element as chat client for Mastodon/Matrix.org - for one single friend who does not trust non open source software like Telegram or Signal (I doubt he ever looked at the source code of Element)

      I only know Element, but it is not only ugly but super inconvenient. Considering that it is supposedly written by geeks for geeks:
      * why can I not change the key bindings?
      * and even worse: why did the UI

  • My first thought was the article was about the prehistoric animal. "Researchers have confirmed the slump in mastodons was caused by them not listening to their mothers in puberty."
  • The bird site is currently failing at one thing after another & sponsors are fleeing & dissociating themselves from it. What effects this'll have on rival services & on people's use of social media (Is the golden age coming to an end?) remains to be seen. Mastodon probably won't end up as another monolithic social media site; it isn't designed to do that anyway. I can see it becoming a tool for niche interest groups in scientific research/academic communities, govt & NGO agencies, all kinds

  • I have a small NextCloud server I run from home. I invited some of my friends to use it so they can do things like make backups of their phone's photo collection or share PDF documents of things of interest (one of them is intent on building a library of food recipes she tried and really liked).

    I use it for my own collection of software so I have Internet access to the installers, as needed, too.

    It's pretty nice, but it soon struck me that it's really a lot like a modern GUI version of the classic computer

  • Lazy reporting (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Baloo Uriza ( 1582831 ) <baloo@ursamundi.org> on Monday February 13, 2023 @03:16PM (#63290167) Homepage Journal
    So, before Elon there was like 400k active users and there's now 1.6 million active users. Lazy reporters call this a slump. Math calls it a huge surge.

    • Mastodon's retention has been really good, especially considering there is no PR or marketing dept, and no manipulative algorithms that try to make people addicted to it. And they got slammed from traffic coming from a major multinational corporation, which they handled pretty well.

      https://www.techdirt.com/2023/... [techdirt.com]

      Someone else pointed out that Mastodon's software only tracks "new logins", so you would expect to see a "slump" as auto-logins become the norm after people get settled with a site+client.

      And spe

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by alexhs ( 877055 )

      Well, you can safely assume that this "anonymous reader" that submitted the story is Elon Musk (or one of his peons) :)

  • ...but there wasn't much in the way of content, at least not where I was looking. The sign up process was more complicated than the value I got out of it and I bailed quickly. I'm sure it's great under the covers, but like a lot of computer geek stuff, they don't make it easy to use. Missed opportunity, the people that tried Mastodon wanted something, but they didn't find it.

  • This sure worked out well for Musk and the new Twitter, hmmm? Lol

    If there had been an exodus to a well run site, then that could have snowballed, and hypothetically eventually started to to include people who were agnostic to the politics behind the exodus, and just wanted to be on the new cool site.

    Not only did that not happen, now the nucleus for it happening is stuck with being attached to a moribund site, and isn't looking for a new home, one which could challenge Twitter.

    Not a reality worthy of anyone'

  • The summary wrongly assumes that the pattern we're seeing is due to Mastodon being complicated, when, in fact, we have every reason to believe otherwise. There are all sorts of obvious reasons that have nothing to do with Mastodon's merits for why people might sign up and then not remain active (and this is true for pretty much any platform that quickly gains traction), but I'll call out just two:

    (1) The Internet is filled with technology enthusiasts who like to stake a claim for their handle whenever a new

  • Obviously it's true that not everyone stuck around, but they gained ~2 million users and ~1 million are still actively using it, for a ~50% retention rate. Isn't that actually really good as these things go?

    • Not if you're Facebook or Twitter, it isn't. Easier to put out a press release claiming Mastodon gaining 1.2 million users is somehow a big slump and let lazy "journalists" uncritically put their name on it and publish it on their employers website.

  • Mastodon's model never made sense. It was based on donated server capacity and volunteer labour to make everything run. It operates on a just be nice to everyone charter that users have no say in and nobody is responsible for. It's designed by Silicon Valley to be a Silicon Valley Clique, like Usenet and BBS used to be, before Silicon Valley screwed everything up.

  • Having 2 IRL friends is getting hard to manage.
    Can't Mastodon use Twitter's API to make it look like both my friends are on the same social media?

  • Ruby on Rails! I have been looking at various social media packages. I want to play in the Fediverse [wikipedia.org]. And the Mastodon install just seems hard. I still have not gotten it up. And how does Rails scale? I am a bit different because I am looking to setup a server for my own projects. Maybe I am looking for something maybe more lamp stack/service oriented since that is where my experience lies. And maybe scales better. But I am still playing around and looking at setups for testing. Hubzilla ran easy, once I d

  • The number of registered users has gone up continuously - there is no " half a million fewer total registered users than at the start of the year."

    They have provided no information on how they are working out how many active users there are ... the nature of a Federated network does not allow this to be easily gathered ... the nearest is what most sites do is count the number of logins ... but automatic re-logins are not counted, so the most active users do not get counted ...

  • What it proves (again) is that the angry petulant masses that insist "if x happens, I'm going to do y" sorry of threat, predicated on anyone giving a shit about their presence in the first place, are generally just children full of inchoate rage.

    Where x equals something like "trump gets elected" or "musk buys Twitter"
    And y equals "move to Canada" or "quit Twitter FOREVER"

  • Counter.Social keeps getting easier and easier to use, and is safe and troll-free, no data harvested.

  • You have a bunch of new users signing into a new-to-them service, and the majority of them are still active months after the initial spike triggered by Musk's mismanagement on Twitter. Not only that, but the usage is dozens of times greater than before the muskopalypse. This is not a "slump". This is surprising strength for a complex and unoptimized platform.

  • Certainly, the rise has fallen drastically, but I just looked at the figures, from 18:00 and the number of new users is still increasing slowly.

    A "slump" is when that number drops to zero and then below.

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