A different take: Twitter’s lifeline is its celebrities, and the majority of them have chosen to stay. Combine that with the fact that most people join Twitter to follow those same celebrities and you have your answer. Same thing with Instagram. You literally have the notion of “following” there. They cannot be compared to Reddit where the lifeline is instead those anonymous users who randomly contribute content.

I tried Mastodon for a couple of days back when it first caught on as the Twitter alternative. It’s probably noteworthy that the whole Twitter experience has never appealed to me, and I’ve never had an account there. So I was mostly just curious about Mastodon.

I found it to be frustratingly opaque and I didn’t stay.

Pretty much immediately after spez’s AMA, I heard about kbin/lemmy and came and checked it out, and I basically haven’t left since. This is now my home.

Admittedly, the biggest difference to me is likely that I’m already very familiar with forum structure. So I could pretty much entirely focus on learning the quirks of the fediverse, which didn’t take long at all.

I suspect though that even if I was unfamiliar with forums, it still would’ve been easier to figure things out here, and by extension, that it has been easier for most people.

The fundamental difference as I see it is that forums work by first designating a place for discussion, then designating the topic(s) to be discussed there, and only then populating it with posters. So that means that right off the bat, people can go to specific places dedicated to their specific interests, then just see what’s there. The complications of the fediverse can be sorted out later - they can engage pretty much immediately.

By contrast, a Twitter/Mastodon style place (I have no idea what the generic term for them might be) starts by allowing individuals to create accounts, then those individuals write posts, then those posts are (maybe) categorized in some fashion. So to somebody new to the site, it’s just a bunch of people they likely know nothing about, and who knows what they have to say or what they’re saying it about, so there’s no particular reason to click on any one link over any other. Add in the complications inherent to the fediverse and the whole thing is just too complex to bother with.

Going to copy paste the response I made when this was posted in a different community:

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 don’t know whether fail is the right word per se, and it’s certainly also too soon to say that the reddit migration has succeeded.

I think that are some challenges that are inherent to federated models, and I do also think there are challenges that mastodon has that lemmy/kbin can potentially avoid

Common challenges

• How federation works is confusing to the average non-technical user. This increases the barrier to entry
• There is an inherent tension between instance best practices (keeping the size manageable, having proactive moderation, not federating with nazis) and rapidly scaling federated networks to much larger numbers of users. Thus even in the best case scenario, onboarding a mass “migration” is hard to do well

Key differences between mastodon and lemmy/kbin

• Mastodon is basically hostile to search and discoverability. This is an important feature for most of the people who really enjoy using Mastodon, but it’s a huge downside for a lot of folks who thrived on twitter. But Lemmy has search! Kind of janky, but it’s there.
• It’s hard to get people to use tags. Twitter clout weirdos simply made tags too uncool for most people to willingly use them anymore. And what little discoverability there is on mastodon relies on tags. Lemmy doesn’t have this problem because communities/subreddits never acquired the stigma that tags have.

Cultural stuff which is very tbd on here

• Mastodon has a huge problem with passive aggressive white techies and their micro- and macro-aggressions against people of color, which has flared up repeatedly and made it harder for key communities to flourish on Mastodon. Unclear how this kind of thing is going to play out on lemmy. Seems at a glance like there are fewer passive aggressive liberals but way more outright edgelords.
• There’s a large cleavage between two different conceptions of how federation and defederation should work, which in Mastodon has resulted in people being split between a few huge, poorly moderated mainstream instances that are kind of tedious to be on, and many small curated instances that are pleasant to be on but have complex siloed defederation politics, and also the nazi/spammer gab cesspool.
• Mastodon has apolitical techbro development but a huge lefty userbase; lemmy has hard-left development but a huge apolitical techbro userbase. (This is extremely funny to me.)

If you’re like me & used Twitter as an RSS replacement after Google killed Reader, it didn’t fail at all.

Following hashtags on Mastodon is actually better than Twitter ever was for me.