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Why is Mastodon struggling to survive? (www.reddit.com)

submitted 1 month ago by thenexusofprivacy to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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I don't like the clickbait title at all -- Mastodon's clearly going to survive, at least for the forseeable future, and it wouldn't surprise me if it outlives Xitter.

Still, Mastodon is struggling; most of the people who checkd it out in the November 2022 surge (or the smaller June 2023 surge) didn't stick around, and numbers have been steadily declining for the last year. The author makes some good points, and some of the comments are excellent.

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[-] dragontamer@lemmy.world 115 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Because Threads and BlueSky form effective competition with Twitter.

Also, short form content with just a few sentences per post sucks. It's become obvious. That Twitter was mostly algorithm hype and FOMO.

Mastodon tries to be healthier but I'm not convinced that microblogs in general are that useful, especially to a techie audience who knows RSS and other publishing formats.

[-] thenexusofprivacy 15 points 1 month ago

Bluesky certainly provides another option ... when Apartheid Clyde led to Twitter getting shut down in Brazil, there was a small bump in Mastodon's numbers, but a much bigger influx to Bluesky. Then again Bluesky's addressed a lot of problems people coming to Mastodon in 2022 had, and Mastodon hasn't, so if everybody had come to Mastodon instead the pattern would likely have repeated itself and most of them wouldn't have stuck around.

[-] otter@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 month ago

What are some of the issues you'd like to see addressed? I don't use mastodon as much so I'm not familiar with what has / hasn't been done.

ex. I hear they've been working on content discovery, such as with the recommended accounts carousel

[-] thenexusofprivacy 15 points 1 month ago

https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt is a good overview (not by me!) of issues that the November 2022 wave ran into. What's frustrating is that so many of these are very similar to the issues the April 2017 wave ran into!

Release 4.3 did some work on the recommended accounts, that's good, but the problems start even before that. What instance to sign up to? Most people have better experiences on smaller instances that match either their interests or their geography ... but how to find them? mastodon.social is (for most people) kind of meh -- certainly not the worst, but it's not all that well-moderated, and it's big enough that the local feed isn't useful for finding interesting people or stuff -- and that's now the default. Also it took over a year to get 4.3 out; I get it, they're a small team, some stuff turned out to be a lot harder than expected, and they had to deal with a bunch of security patches in the interim ... still, that means progress is frustratingly slow.

[-] AlexisFR@jlai.lu 6 points 1 month ago

The fact that like an rethreads are not federated is I pretty big issue. Like if you come from a small instance, you'll see most global posts at 0 likes, which makes the platform look dead.