this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2025
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Mastodon as a mass market solution has failed. It's essentially irrelevant outside of a tiny niche
What are you talking about? It has a million active users. With an advertising budget of zero.
I wanted to leave Twitter too. I'm a professional engineer in tech and I found setting up in Mastodon to be... ...not straightforward, as did a whole load of other people. I eventually got set up. I couldn't find anyone or anything, the whole model being based around local instances rather than users or topics but.. I tried to make the best of it and I followed the other people who had left Twitter that I had followed there when they said where to find them on Mastodon. Then I found I had run into a 'silencing' drama where some other instance admins had taken issue with an admin for the instance I was signed up to and as a result everyone on my instance was essentially shadowbanned in a whole load of other places. It had been happening maybe a month before I even found out about this. I'm a grown up, I don't have time for school time drama. I found that I was using Mastodon less and less and so were the people I had been following. Then my BlueSky invite came through. I can find topics and I can find users. People post and people respond. I don't have to worry which of 100 identical usernames across different instances is the 'real' one or my instance being defederated or silenced.
The problem with Mastodon is it's basically a social network for people who are into Mastodon, and enjoy centering around their specific instance. It might work for Warcraft guilds but it doesn't work for me, or any of the people or topics I want to follow, ostly current affairs and tech. As opposed to BlueSky which is a social network for people who:
No doubt at this point you will want to tell me how I'm all wrong, clearly tech illiterate and how Mastodon has at least as many users as BlueSky. Sure, whatevs. It's like Linux on the Desktop, not a viable mass-market proposition at this point (saying this with 25 years Linux desktop experience).
I'm not sure we are having the same conversation. You are talking about how Mastodon was not a good fit for you personally, maybe because of a bad server.
I'm saying that lots of people use it for all sorts of great things, and it's an excellent option for a public health agency.