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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.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    13 hours ago

    Then once signed up discovery was/is a pain. How do I find good accounts when they aren’t synced with the instance I am on? Fuck if I know, I never found an equivalent to lemmyverse.net for mastodon.

    Feels like the A.1 issue of Mastadon as a platform. If person A on instance Q wants to follow person B on instance R, there’s no straight line easy path to do that. Compared to Twitter or BlueSky or Threads, where its all one ecosystem and you just say “I’d like to follow @LieutenantDickweasel” and now you’ve got their posts in your stream, Mastadon is byzantine and not worth the effort to explore.

    On the flip side, Truth Social is a Mastadon instance, and it’s trading with a market cap of several billion dollars. Seems successful enough to me.

    I think I’m just falling out of favour with the idea of a microblogging platform with strangers

    Generally speaking, you’re not on these services to follow strangers per say. You’re on there to interact with D-list celebrities and other highly niche personalities. Or you’re on the system to self-promote and become a D-list celebrity/niche personality. Webcomics artists, semi-famous musicians, podcasters, and political bloggers are all over my feed. I’d never talk to these people IRL. And I’d never interact with them if they were even slightly more popular or famous. But in this space, its a cozy little “oh let’s check in on what the author of AtomicRobo Comics is up to?” fan relationship that’s fruitful and fun for everyone involved.

    But Mastadon is shit at putting indie fans in touch with their focus of attention. After that, what am I using this for other than a stripped-down Discord or glorified group-SMS? Pointless.

    One reason why Truth Social was able to work stemmed from the fact that it was a single magnetizing D-list celebrity that drew people in. But even then, you’re talking about an audience in the… thousands? Even as a one-stop shop for all things Donald Trump, it’s low energy and lame when compared to Twitter.