| ▲ | bhhaskin 6 hours ago | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Mastodon has been great. The platform and generally most users aren't trying to constantly sell me something or influence me. It people sharing their lives, hobbies and passion. Influencers don't bother because it doesn't have the massive following and reach other platforms have, but that's part of what makes it special imo. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | mdasen 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Yea, it just feels calmer, where you can follow neat and quirky people who aren't posting like they're addicted to it. It also feels like one place that can just keep going. With BlueSky, I know they're going to need to find a business model to cover the $36M worth of VC they've taken, many millions in salaries and hardware costs they've paid out, and provide a healthy return for all that risk. Mastodon feels like a better version of the early days of the internet. Not everything is perfect, but it's a bunch of people running stuff for themselves and their communities. Now even giant universities with tens of thousands of students outsource their email systems to Microsoft or Google. Most content is going through three companies (ByteDance, Meta, Google) with ByteDance being the "tiny" player at an estimated $300B value (tiny compared to the $1.5B of Meta and $3.4B of Google). Mastodon/ActivityPub stands against that. It lets everyone have their own little piece of the internet and get and send feed updates to each other. No one dominates the network so much that there's a risk of them cutting off the rest. Mastodon gGmbH is a non-profit. It feels like it can have longevity in a world where I'm always waiting for the enshittification to be turned on. One of the reasons I love Wikipedia is because it feels like a breath of fresh air on an internet that's always trying to make a quick buck, influence me, etc. Mastodon similarly feels like a breath of fresh air. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | spartanatreyu 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
> Influencers don't bother because it doesn't have the massive following and reach other platforms have Mastodon doesn't have an "algorithm" (in the online recommendation sense). Every post is sorted by post date, which biases against virality. Influencers don't go on mastodon because they can't "go viral". They can't spew dramaslop or whatever other psychological trickery to gain a greater reach. Mastodon isn't built for influencers, it's built against them. --- It's also not growth-hacking to a reach critical mass usage before rug-pulling its users into a pit of every expanding service enshitification. That's what makes it feel so much more authentic compared to other social networks. It's the social media network from a parallel universe where the non-profit Wikipedia/Wikimedia purchased Twitter and Discord, merged them together then got rid of the mic rooms. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | nabla9 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
There are some tight groups, but number of active users is very low and getting lower, number of serves is also decreasing. I did some random sampling and it looks like large number of active users are talking to void and may not have realized it. They post regularly, have 100s of followers but no active followers. The most popular servers like mastodon.social are cesspools of snark, anger and grandstanding. Oh, and the moderation is random/nonexistent depending on the day. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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