I’ve been using fediverse stuff (Mastodon and, most recently, Calckey – I’m just going to use “Mastodon” as shorthand here, purists can bite me) for over a year now, a…
Pretty interesting opinion piece on some of the UX hurdles open source and federated software faces.
When the Twitter migration happened, a lot of folks got overenthusiastic about the idea of the fediverse and started setting up their own Mastodon instances, despite having little to no experience with selfhosting before.
A lot of such instances have since shut down as they realised the amount of efforts that actually needs into hosting such a platform, especially instances with open registrations. However, a large number of them did survive and are now thriving.
Has the growth rate slowed? Sure, just like it is expected happen after a sudden influx. But it is false to say that Mastodon growth has stalled. Instead, the phrase I would use is ‘stabilized’. Mastodon growth has stabilized into a healthy level as user growth is now happening more organically. Some stats below:
For example I use two accounts on different servers with very different content. Personally I really like that separation.
Yeah, same here; I also have multiple Mastodon accounts. Ironically, the “everything” nature of Twitter was something that made me not use it much, because I have multiple interests some of which are quite disparate (for example, videogames, and some professional field), and so I was never really comfortable with those streams mixing readily.
With Mastodon I can easily keep them separate but also have the option to cross-post whenever I want.
When the Twitter migration happened, a lot of folks got overenthusiastic about the idea of the fediverse and started setting up their own Mastodon instances, despite having little to no experience with selfhosting before.
A lot of such instances have since shut down as they realised the amount of efforts that actually needs into hosting such a platform, especially instances with open registrations. However, a large number of them did survive and are now thriving.
Has the growth rate slowed? Sure, just like it is expected happen after a sudden influx. But it is false to say that Mastodon growth has stalled. Instead, the phrase I would use is ‘stabilized’. Mastodon growth has stabilized into a healthy level as user growth is now happening more organically. Some stats below:
12,808,214 accounts +217,864 in the last week
Stats on most active instances:
By number of users:
https://i.postimg.cc/fb6FyY89/Screenshot-20230625-121432-Firefox.jpg
By number of posts:
https://i.postimg.cc/cCWbM0y1/Screenshot-20230625-121509-Firefox.jpg
How can anyone look at these numbers and say that the growth has stalled?
I have been working in software development for 2 decades. I’m saying that to make the point that I’m in the more technical group of internet users.
Anyway even I just jumped ship from Twitter to mastodont without really understanding how it worked.
So I’m pretty sure lots of users just signed up with the first server they found and slowly realized it wasn’t just a Twitter clone.
Now that I do understand it I really love the concept, but it’s definitely different than just Twitter.
For example I use two accounts on different servers with very different content. Personally I really like that separation.
Yeah, same here; I also have multiple Mastodon accounts. Ironically, the “everything” nature of Twitter was something that made me not use it much, because I have multiple interests some of which are quite disparate (for example, videogames, and some professional field), and so I was never really comfortable with those streams mixing readily.
With Mastodon I can easily keep them separate but also have the option to cross-post whenever I want.