To those who come here to say that Fediverse is too small to be in any way, shape or form viable, I'll repeat my comment from the other day [0] that the Fediverse is not in a contest to existing megascale platforms:
> The growth-hacking folks around here should realize that from the perspective of the Fediverse there is no such "contest". This is probably the biggest difference why Twitter is by no means an alternative to Mastodon. There's no need to grow at all costs, move fast and break things, do crazy things to get engagement levels up, no commercial incentives, valuations, VC and shareholders to satisfy. The Fediverse is a network created by people, for people, and it is noticeable in the culture.. if you stop the frantic growth-hacking and take the time to discover it.
This is right. The Fediverse and Mastodon aren't products. As the most widespread implementation of ActivityPub (and AGPL'ed to boot), Mastodon, like WordPress and the Linux kernel before it, is more like a force of nature.
It's something that more and more people will adopt over time because it's free and "good enough" for some use cases. A fraction of those who adopt it will contribute to it and it will improve. The longer this virtuous cycle continues the harder it is to stop. Over several decades it will commoditize a chunk of a technology layer that's currently proprietary (basically, the social graph). Maybe a huge chunk of it.
Again just like Linux and WordPress - there will be lots of of critics and naysaying from people who don't understand the economics of the software industry (or in some cases simply don't want to). They will be wrong, again. They will moan about it for many years after it has become successful. History repeats.
I hope you're right. But it does have to achieve escape velocity. There are lots of interesting open source projects that never quite made it. Jabber/XMPP, for instance: it seemed like it would inevitably take over messaging for a while in the early 00s...but then a flood of richer chat apps washed it away, and we were stuck in a world of walled gardens again. Jabber never quite died, but it certainly didn't live up to it's full potential.
the AP ecosystem is a genie that can't be placed back inside the bottle, it can not be bought by a single malicious actor (or nation-state), and it was built openly by folks associated by the W3C as a standard specification for anyone to freely implement. looking forward for media and the public sector (emergency comms etc) to get on board.
Dont worry about the "growth" hackers. Attention is finite. They cant hack that.
How many books get added to a library, or how many ppl get shoved into the library, has no effect on how many books one person can actually read and digest at a time.
Quite correct. I'd argue it's not even the right framework to consider the question.
Individual Mastodon nodes might be interested in maximizing their userbase. But talking about "Growth goals for Mastodon" is like trying to talk about "Growth goals for the Internet."
I didn't find anything interesting about Mastodon. It felt like just another Twitter to me. I don't care about some random dude's cat pictures or their takes on politics or what they had for lunch. Is there something I'm missing?
To be fair, if you don't use Twitter then you are already well removed from the target demographic that might find Mastodon useful. That said, there are a lot of really useful takes on Mastodon on various topics. Politics is probably the area where you will find the most number of takes. But in infosec, and game development at least, there's a lot of interesting info. The biggest issue with Mastodon or the fediverse rather is the lack of full text search and the cultural push back against it. I don't view the push back as negative. It's a sign that the community has strong opinions and that's a good thing. But the lack of search does make it hard to peek into a conversation around a topic which to me takes away from the experience of jumping into communities of interest.
I agree. I find it interesting that we took search on Twitter for granted and only realize later that it is probably more important than expected. Maybe a search engine for Mastodon can fix this.
AFAIK there have been several attempts at this, but Mastodon deliberately does not support arbitrary search and some communities are extremely hostile to having their posts scraped.
Given how many political battles there are on platforms that do have full text search, I don't think it's the lack or presence of full text search that causes such things. Rather it seems likely that political battles naturally arise on any social media platform that allows broadcasting your opinion to the whole world.
The Mastodon argument against generic search is that it leads to pile-ons. If you want to opt-in a post to be searchable then you expose it via hashtags. To a Twitter user it feels a bit over-exuberant new social media manager, but once you understand the context it becomes more understandable.
Unfortunately not enough people use it. And realistically, in the middle of a formula 1 race or a ufc fight, there’s no time to be hashtagging each and every keyword if you are live sharing your thoughts or replying to others. A single key hashtag is fine like #AusGP. But when I want to search for Albon and Red Flags and opinions on that, I can’t expect people to do #Albon and #RedFlag. Full text search is sorely missed :,(
The real reason is mostly just speed. Pleroma has a full text search and its frankly kinda ass in terms of speed. You need fairly beefy hardware to make full-text searches an option if you're dealing with that many "documents". Doubly so on Mastodon, which is already fairly bogged down by being a Rails application.
The infra can't really support it without heavily centralizing the model (something for which Mastodons questionable tech stack already doesn't do itself any favors).
There's also a bit of a privacy concern in that many instances just don't like it when big nameless entities start scraping the posts of their users, which also leads to a fairly hostile mentality towards the concept.
There's another aspect to Mastodon search that distinguishes it from Twitter. When you search you do so in your own history of prior interactions. It is like 'personal search' that way and becomes more valuable the longer you are active on the Fediverse.
My mastodon feed is generally people talking about stuff they find interesting. Twitter is 95% like this
X is really important.
5 things you have to know: (thread)
All because of trying to game/use all the engagement figures about what shows your post more. Splitting your content into two tweets with half the people clicking through after reading the first results in half the people actually getting the information but massively more engagement stats so Twitter thinks it's much more important.
This seems to be a trend amongst wannabe influencers - sader than the lack of actual content is that you see the same thread copied and pasted and used by multiple accounts.
I deactivated my Twitter account (set to private), from time to time I take a peek and it looks like the new algorithmically generated timeline really seems to push these garbage listicle tweet-threads.
A lot of open source developers also post about other topics like their cats, dogs and favorite types of bread.
Which is fine. It's their profile. With twitter I could filter out these with carefully crafted search queries on separately maintained lists since I only have so much time in my day to devote to Tech,
I cannot do this on Mastodon since no one is diligent about hashtags and it is an explicit policy to cripple search. I've most stopped following open source developers since then.
I'm not consistent with it. I just check it occasionally. For people I'm particularly interested in (and who don't post that often!), I'll go to their profile and scroll down that separately to if there's anything I've missed. For others, if I didn't see it then that's ok.
> A lot of open source developers also post about other topics like their cats, dogs and favorite types of bread.
I just don't follow (or later unfollow) anyone who does this.
I care a lot about some random person's astronomy pictures. They're fun to look at. And some random person's programming content, or history or geology content... Good stuff.
You can seriously curate your own feed on Mastodon.
You aren't missing anything. It's not a forum, it's just people from mainstream social media who have sought to leave mainstream social media for various reasons. There are some interesting tech people on some instances, but it's generally not worth wading through the hundreds of people attracted to the idea of a more hugbox Twitter.
> Most of what we hear of the Fediverse is rants about twitter and a few of the same subcultures over and over again.
I feel like this isn't true anymore. There's definitely a lot of chatter about Twitter of course and even more so now that there's regular Twitter related drama happening. But I have 7 federated instances on speed dial that range from general purpose, to infosec, to art, and to game development. They all talk about a lot of stuff, not just the things related purely to the server theme. I checked all of their local timelines just now and found only one post talking about Twitter and it was just a link to a news item where Elon talks about government access to Twitter.
Notably absent were any growth hack posts. Everything was just stream of consciousness stuff.
A lot of the rants came from frustrated people migrating away from Twitter by the shenanigans of Musk. There has been a bit of a culture change due to the large influx. But now that these people get to be comfortable in their new 'home', these discussion also become less frequent. Of course it is also who you follow that determines how you are exposed to these rants. If you are in a Twitter exodus group there'll be plenty more ranting.
Yeah, I think over the last few months the number of posts about Twitter (from the people I follow at least) have dropped to about 10-20% of what they were.
Honestly as a pretty heavy fediverse user who ditched twitter, I see maybe two or three posts a week about twitter. Most people have other things to talk about.
The exception is when twitter does something exceptionally stupid or controversial, but even then I don't think twitter ends up overwhelming my feed or anything.
How many XX-chromosome neurotypical a-political undyed-hair normies are on your 7 federated instances? Please, count.
People can be miffed at me for pointing this truth out but that is how social networks grow big. Such is life.
The Rihanna/Swift/Kardashian/BlackPink people will never switch and as they will correctly inform you, they run the world. It is called social media, remember?
Social people will stay on Instagram and Twitter as that is where you get attention. AI researchers are all on Twitter too for that matter. The gravitational pull is too strong.
Edit: Hmm, I wonder who is downvoting this obvious mathematical fact of life, such a mystery!
The subject is growth hacking and social networks.
Social networks grow big by targeting young female users as a vector for growth. Well documented countless times and talked about at length by the people who work there, this is one of the very key original "growth hacks" and not some sort of secret.
Rihanna posts baby pictures on twitter that get more views and engagement than all of the fediverse combined. This captures the key demographic.
You're welcome to publicly explain how the statement that you need buy in from content producers in the vain of Rihanna/Swift/Kardashians/BlackPink to capture the young female crowd, which brings in the young male crowd, which drives enough critical mass to bring in everybody else, an outright mathematical fact (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law), as some sort of flame bait.
I am familiar with your link. What guideline specifically am I violating here in this thread please Dang? Thanks in advance.
You violated the site guidelines against flamebait, name-calling, and snark, for starters. Also the one that asks you not to go on about downvotes. And no doubt others as well.
You already asked that question and I attempted to answer it in the comment you are replying to. If you want a more specific breakdown, this sentence:
"How many XX-chromosome neurotypical a-political undyed-hair normies are on your 7 federated instances? Please, count."
contains flamebait, name-calling, and snark. In a rather concentrated form! This sentence:
"People can be miffed at me for pointing this truth out but that is how social networks grow big"
is just grandiose flamewar rhetoric of the kind we don't want here. And this sentence:
"Edit: Hmm, I wonder who is downvoting this obvious mathematical fact of life, such a mystery!"
broke the site guideline against going on about downvotes.
You had a substantive point to make in that GP comment, but you made it in a way that broke the site guidelines badly. I shouldn't have to explain this to you—it seems quite obvious.
If you had made the same point in a thoughtful, respectful, conversational way, that would have been completely fine.
> And I attempted to answer it in the comment you are replying to
An attempt that was not sincere.
"And no doubt others as well" <- You are just transparently grasping at straws. You very much should have doubt, this is not an appropriate attitude for a mod on HN.
"contains flamebait, name-calling, and snark. In a rather concentrated form!"
What to be clear beyond a shadow of a doubt for the record is the name, specifically, that I am "name-calling"? The snark is in your mind friend. I was talking about the demographics, full stop.
Here is the guide line you are violating:
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
"You had a substantive point to make in that GP comment" - Thank you for a minimal amount of honesty.
Repeatedly saying that mention of Metcalfe's law is "grandiose flamewar rhetoric" does not make it so. It just does not.
> If you had made the same point in a thoughtful, respectful, conversational way, that would have been completely fine.
I do not believe that to be the case at all. The objection is clearly to its contents and you are retrofitting "violations".
By all means can you demonstrate how my comment can be re-written without changing its meaning? You are not acting as an impartial moderator at all, I don't think you can. There is no "proper phrasing" possible. You took a very mundane post and exploded it into "grandiose flame bait" no less. I urge you to do some soul searching about your behavior.
Just so it is clear to you, there is a growing crowd here that grudge/group flags comments they personally disagree with. They go through peoples comment histories and punish them for wrong think, flag unrelated things, even one word comments like "thanks". Flag first to discourage what they personally find disagreeable and attempt to justify it later if at all. My mention of this particular, somewhat new behavior for HN, is not a "violation". As soon as I posted these users went and started flagging en messe (not just downvoting) random old unrelated comments - hence I edited my post. Their behaviour is acceptable to you? I am the one you call out?
Maybe they've moved what you consider "respectful" language a bit too far with these tactics. Your explanations given here are lacking. There was no flaming going on, none, it is benign neutral language. My most charitable explanation is that you are being played by this group.
And again, nobody will see this now but you dang - do as you wish with this feedback. Consider addressing that particular problem for one or at least acknowledging it.
Sadly, I can't regain access to it, as it was deactivated. Last time I tried, I needed to create a new account in order to create a support request, and things got weird. That was a decade ago, I think.
Maybe open source can project such a thing as "deathzone" around social networks once funding for growth hacking rounds out.
Once matrix is up to discord levels of features, and the horrors facebook will be willing to todo for one last sip of growth get revealed, things might turn sour fast. All it takes is the social carawanne lead animals leaving the beaten track and the whole network will unravel following them.
Seems like tons of Mastodon advocates are the ones always pitching it as an alternative to Twitter. Every time that happens, I'll just get the numbers out since you brought up the total number or registered users which is irrelevant to active users:
Twitter: 220M+ DAU over 17 years.
Mastodon: ~50,000 DAU (1.4M MAU) over 7 years.
What matters in social networks is scale and it still means more users and there is already evidence that Mastodon not only was and is still struggling to scale, but eventually needed to re-centralize to handle their scalability issues, ie. using Cloudflare. Most of the instances there, are hosted by enthusiasts and hobbyists which intermittently struggle with more users.
If an instance is too small, it will easily be at risk of getting attacked and overloaded with users, with the instance falling over and having to close signups. If its too large, they become more centralized and to incentivise federation they have to close signups. Either way, centralization is inevitable.
It's already bad enough for normal users to 'choose an instance' if their can't register on a closed one or if a rouge admin bans you or an entire instance over something silly. Thus, It is quite clear to me, that for normal users who are not techies or geeks, Mastodon is not a viable alternative or even remotely to replace Twitter or even a recommendation.
>If an instance is too small, it will easily be at risk of getting attacked and overloaded with users, with the instance falling over and having to close signups.
Co-admin of https://functional.cafe here. Mastodon lists us as having 213 active users currently, so I guess this counts as a small instance. Haven't seen our instance fall over for more than a day or two except for hitting hardware limits, mostly hard disk space.
Also, I have no idea why you perceive closing sign-ups as a sign of failure. Closing sign-ups or going invite-only protects the current users and state of the instance (and, indirectly, the rest of the Fediverse) both from the dangers of attacks from new users and from explosive growth. Is it some sort of measure of success, to be able to always invite new people even at the expense of already existing ones?
What value does scale have, if you get only lazy retweets and likes and low-quality responses? I don't need 'eyeballs-on-tweet' kind of exposure, but interesting discussions. I get these on the Fediverse, and yes I managed to pass the 15 minutes selection of an instance. Which isn't all-too-important either, as instances federate with each other and you can migrate later, if you wish.
> What value does scale have, if you get only lazy retweets and likes and low-quality responses? I don't need 'eyeballs-on-tweet' kind of exposure, but interesting discussions.
Normal users use the block button, protected tweets and whitelisted or follower-only replies which those already exist. Problem solved. This is a non-issue.
Even by looking at the so-called 'migration', it has failed to convince existing Twitter users to stick around on Mastodon which by comparing with the figures: 220M vs 50,000 daily active users, it is not even close to 1%.
It's clear the Mastodon has decided to immediately disqualify itself and has decided to add more barriers to entry and migrations within migrations as features as you have just admitted:
> ...yes I managed to pass the 15 minutes selection of an instance. Which isn't all-too-important either, as instances federate with each other and you can migrate later, if you wish.
My point(s) still stand. An island for techies and geeks isn't a great pitch to normal people who dislike Twitter and are looking for a viable alternative.
Scale isn't the whole story. The most noticeable thing for me on fedi was that people actually saw my posts and interacted with them. All the DAU on Twitter doesn't matter when you need to pass the Great Filter of the algorithm to get seen. Every post I made on Twitter got almost no engagement, and my friends who followed me would tell me they never saw it. Instead my timeline was full of influencers, bots, and that week's outrage.
On fedi I feel like I have a small community who engages with my posts. I think that's what people want, even a few hundred followers is enough to feel heard. I can control my own timeline and find content I want. It really doesn't matter if it's only 1% the size of Twitter because my timeline is leagues better.
Engagement on Mastodon is simply higher quality IME as well.
Whether it's an "Eternal September" thing or not that Mastodon hasn't hit yet remains to be seen. It really reminds me of modern social media meets older school internet (IRC & web forums days).
I have about 100x as many followers on my biggest twitter account as on my Mastodon, and yet typically get more engagement on Mastodon... Much of it down to the algo, but also, I suspect simply churn: A whole lot of followers who are now longer active. My Mastodon account hasn't had time to accrue many of those so far.
Hold on, are you... getting DAU by dividing MAU by 28? That's very much not how that works; perhaps the easiest way to illustrate this is by considering Facebook, which has ~2bn DAU, but obviously does not have 48bn people using it every month.
In general for social media stuff, DAU and MAU are pretty close to each other; Facebook is 2bn vs 3bn or thereabouts, and AIUI Twitter is even closer.
All the important accounts I followed on twitter switched to Mastodon when Elon got his hands on the platform. I don't want Mastodon to be a Twitter alternative, really, even if it is only for some circles.
The endless Twitter drama and hot takes being pushed in your face by Twitter's engagement algorithm is tiring. I'd be happy if that dredge would be kept away from the Fediverse. It sadly isn't, but at least the situation hasn't gotten nearly as bad as Twitter's thanks to smaller communities that aren't afraid to practice moderation. I know the idea that someone might kick you off your server for being toxic is a problem for some free speech absolutionists, but personally I'm glad to see them return to Twitter/Truth Social/Gap/that weird web3 Twitter without moderation.
If you're trying to build a brand, Twitter is a lot better. Their fake engagement statistics below every post help a lot when it comes to inflating popularity statistics and you can't use ads on Mastodon to force your brand down other people's time lines. Only people who genuinely want to see what you're saying are seeing your content and that's why Mastodon will never replace Twitter:you can't buy your way to some twisted sense of popularity.
I doubt complete centralisation will ever happen. We'll probably end up with a sort of email light, where it's quite easy to set up a smaller instance but the majority of users flock to a few popular servers the same way Gmail and Outlook have replaced ISP mail accounts. However, because Mastodon and other Fediverse services don't really have a way to do AI moderation in a way that pretends to work well enough, I don't think scaling up to servers of more than a few thousand people is really viable.
Because the more people you have to read or talk to, the better? Because you want all your friends and people you want to hear from to be already there?
It's like those threads about Signal, talking about how much better it is compared to whatsapp and the rest - okay, maybe, but if my friends aren't there already, it's worthless.
No, for some maybe, for others not. Also quantity vs quality.
And also, what about those monopolies, I understand motivation, but the outcome is problematic.. If we want the everybody encompassing user platform it shouldn't be commercialized and owned like that, with a lot of idealism ;)
> but if my friends aren't there already, it's worthless
See that is another level problem there also.. if everybody jumps out of the window, I need too?How did we survive just prior to mega social networks.. huh.
So again, I know for some what you mention is the important point. But don't tell evryone, and also every playform, that if they are not aiming for super growth they are doing it wrong, because (and likely even intentionally) they aren't!
What matters is if the right people are there. Same reason why we're on HN even though it's tony compared to Reddit. And many of us are both places.
For me, Mastodon now have more of the right people than Twitter, but I still hold on to my Twitter accounts too because there are others I still want to talk to there.
What's this thing with the absolute wish to centralise everything?
The Internet is decentralisation, it's birth is interconnecting networks, having one massive network being just not scaleable.
The web is a decentralise content system, allowing anybody to add content easily is the reason it scaled. Same goes for the domain name system.
Companies like Twitter HAVE to decentralise their system in some ways to make it scale, because centralisation does not scale (using CDNs, caches, replication, etc...).
Centralisation do makes seems much simpler to build, but it's not a strength, it's a big weakness and create single points of failure.
> These stats seem to suggest that there are well over a million DAU
Please. That is the figures for the MAUs [0] and you're clearly using that to attempt to pass that as a source for the non-existent daily active users metric and you know it.
That does NOT say "Daily". Surely you can read that.
> Moreover, you're still attempting to pass off 50,000 as something you just didn't make up out of thin air.
Even it is wrong, There are no sources out there that is verifiable and you haven't provided one after I debunked your figures (which is actually the MAUs).
So as long as the exact DAUs is unknown, the figures can be estimated to be as low as 100,000 DAUs and even worst case 50,000 DAUs.
> That does NOT say "Daily". Surely you can read that.
Yes, I discussed the issue in the link I gave. Surely you can read that.
> So as long as the exact DAUs is unknown, the figures can be estimated to be as low as 100,000 DAUs and even worst case 50,000 DAUs.
This doesn't follow. I can estimate it as 2 people. Or 2 billion people. Where does 100,000 or 50,000 come from? You repeatedly refuse to give any evidence that you haven't made those numbers up out of thin air.
Anyway, it's redundant to argue the exact same thing in 2 different threads, so let's stick to the other thread please, since it has more info and explanation.
Nope. After 7 years that is the MAUs as clearly shown to everyone. There are no issues with that figure.
> This doesn't follow. I can estimate it as 2 people. Or 2 billion people. Where does 100,000 or 50,000 come from? You repeatedly refuse to give any evidence that you haven't made those numbers up out of thin air.
NO source exists for Mastodon that verifies the DAUs, since it is not given; meaning that one can only estimate. The problem with your 'link' is that you continuously use it as the wrong metric when it is for the MAUs.
So until you provide a verifiable source for the 'DAU' figures it can only be estimated. I gave mine and you can disagree with it. But without such a definitive verifiable source confirming the DAUs, I can just dismiss it like you can dismiss my estimate.
Furthermore, it is no good blaming a 'label' that has been there for 7 years and now having a problem with it given you still don't have a source for the DAUs.
I'm not sure why you continued in this thread rather than in the other thread with more info and explanation as I suggested, but anyway...
Even if we assume for the sake of argument that "active_user_count" in https://api.joinmastodon.org/statistics is monthly active users, there's still a major problem with your daily estimate, because the monthly active user count is remarkably stable from day to day.
We have 32 days of data, and on most days the change in monthly active users is only around 5000, sometimes less. There was one day where the active user count dropped 13K, and one day where it grew 27K, but those are outliers.
How is it possible that ~92-96% of Mastodon users are not daily active users, yet the monthly active user count only changes from day to day by an average of less than 10K? Your numbers just don't add up. They don't even make sense, as far as human behavior is concerned, and it certainly doesn't align with what we see on every other social network.
They certainly seem to be very loyal, consistent monthly active users. I'm not sure what Twitter means exactly by a "daily" active user. I think I would have been considered one, but I also definitely missed days, so what qualifies or disqualifies an account as a daily active user? How many days can you miss?
This seems erroneous "~50,000 DAU (1.4M MAU)". It can't be true that the average monthly user only interacts once per month (1.4M/50k). How do you explain the figure? Dividing MAU by 30 would not be a good approach.
At least one 'Toot' from a registered user a day = 1 daily active user (DAU), no matter how many times they toot, boost, reply or whatever.
> Dividing MAU by 30 would not be a good approach.
It is. By doing so with the top 20 Mastodon instances [0] we get even less than 50,000 users using it daily, hence the generous approximation. Even if we don't, we can only imply that the DAU is ultimately far less than 100,000 users a day, posting at least once on the platform.
This is why many Mastodon supporters would rather not tell me the daily active users and would immediately avoid mentioning it, which this is the real reason why they cannot claim that millions are using it 'daily'.
> At least one 'Toot' from a registered user a day = 1 daily active user (DAU), no matter how many times they toot, boost, reply or whatever.
This is not how Twitter measures DAU. In fact, most Twitter users are quiet lurkers who rarely if ever tweet. Twitter makes money (or used to make money) from their eyeballs, not from their tweets.
We are talking about Mastodon's DAU which that is still a mystery. Twitter's DAU is already known to be over in the hundreds of millions approximately.
The whole point is:
>> Even if we don't, we can only imply that the DAU is ultimately far less than 100,000 users a day, posting at least once on the platform.
Either way, it is safe to assume and with the data from Fedlist and matching it with the instances of 'active users' it is still less than 1% of the DAUs on Twitter, hence why Mastodon fans (like yourself) cannot claim and proudly show that there are 'millions of users' using it daily.
Furthermore, debunking the so-called 'Twitter migration' that wasn't.
You don't even know yourself. That statistic is "MONTHLY" active users, not DAILY active users. You gave a figure that is collected directly from the 'servers' page that literally says "Monthly Active Users". [0]
I think it's actually the "Monthly" label there that seems somewhat misleading, unless perhaps it means they update the page once a month.
In any case, as another commenter mentioned, DAU and MAU tend to be relatively close. You don't go from 1.2M monthly users all the way down to 50K daily active users, that's nonsense. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35600846
> I think it stands for, you made it up. You still haven't given any citation whatever for that number.
We both know there are NO sources. You gave a source for the MAUs. Thus, we can only give approximations and estimations of its DAUs.
> I think it's actually the "Monthly" label there that seems somewhat misleading, unless perhaps it means they update the page once a month.
Now you think it's the label's fault, after 7 years? Oh no! "It's misleading"!
Something that has been representative of Mastodon's monthly usage for 7 years is now not believable and is 'misleading'! /s Oh dear.
> In any case, as another commenter mentioned, DAU and MAU tend to be relatively close. You don't go from 1.2M monthly users all the way down to 50K daily active users, that's nonsense. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35600846
Not for federated networks, yet here we are comparing centralized platforms like Facebook, Twitter and counting the numbers as if they are the same which we both know they aren't.
Henceforth, give a proper source that is verifiable that shows Mastodons DAUs and NOT its MAUs next time since you're still struggling to do so.
You're being deliberately obtuse. I said the raw data for 2023-04-15 on https://api.joinmastodon.org/statistics matches exactly the numbers on https://joinmastodon.org/servers for "Data collected by crawling all accessible Mastodon servers on Apr 15, 2023." Everyone can see that, including you if you choose. I didn't say the numbers were "not believable".
The question is what "Monthly" is supposed to mean exactly, given that the raw numbers change every day, as everyone can see from the above link. And as I said, one possible interpretation is "unless perhaps it means they update the page once a month".
> Not for federated networks
Says you, with no evidence, again. What exactly was your methodology for producing the estimate "50,000"?
> You're being deliberately obtuse. I said the raw data for 2023-04-15 on https://api.joinmastodon.org/statistics matches exactly the numbers on https://joinmastodon.org/servers for "Data collected by crawling all accessible Mastodon servers on Apr 15, 2023." Everyone can see that, including you if you choose. I didn't say the numbers were "not believable".
And that represents the 'monthly' usage as I repeatedly said. That only shows MAUs, not daily. Never was a problem for 7 years.
> The question is what "Monthly" is supposed to mean exactly, given that the raw numbers change every day, as everyone can see from the above link. And as I said, one possible interpreation is "unless perhaps it means they update the page once a month".
It is clear that it is representative of the MAU of every "active" Mastodon instance and corroborates with that fedi-list link I gave which also clearly shows "MAU" and matches with that.
There is no room for excuses or blaming labels after 7 years of Mastodon's MAUs count.
> Says you, with no evidence, again. What exactly was your methodology for producing the estimate "50,000"?
Yet it seems that you haven't even tried refuting it with any verifiable source and you are continuously passing the MAU metric as the DAU which is clearly incorrect, which I can dismiss your so-called 'DAU' source for Mastodon. Until then:
"Give a proper source that is verifiable that shows Mastodons DAUs and NOT its MAUs next time since you're still struggling to do so."
Me: What exactly was your methodology for producing the estimate "50,000"?
You: Yadda yadda yadda... [no answer]
I'm actually fine with taking 1.2 million as the assumption for the monthly active user count, but it's still absurd and inexplicable to go from that to a 50K daily active user estimate.
Do you have a verifiable source for the DAUs? Not MAUs?
You: Errr......
So once again, you come back and have zero verifiable source(s) for the DAUs count for Mastodon.
> I'm actually fine with taking 1.2 million as the assumption for the monthly active user count, but it's still absurd and inexplicable to go from that to a 50K daily active user estimate.
It has always been that source for Mastodon's 'Monthly Active Users' for years and you knowingly used it to prove the numbers for the 'Daily Active Users', then when questioned you blamed the 'label' as 'misleading'.
The "Monthly Active Users" label could not have been more clearer and has been for years. You are free to dismiss my estimate, but once again you have admitted that you don't have any sources to even show me the DAUs.
So again:
"Give a proper source that is verifiable that shows Mastodons DAUs and NOT its MAUs"
I never had a strong opinion about how exactly Mastodon measures "active_user_count". I did find it curious from https://api.joinmastodon.org/statistics that they seem to be scraping the servers every day, and this suggested to me that they might be counting daily active users. I could be wrong though. I don't know the technical details of how they calculate it. And I already said earlier: "In any case, as another commenter mentioned, DAU and MAU tend to be relatively close. You don't go from 1.2M monthly users all the way down to 50K daily active users, that's nonsense." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35602391 So I was already granting that 1.2M could be the monthly user account, even while considering the possibility that it might be the daily count. I don't really care either way. I don't think it helps your argument if it's the monthly user account. So let 1.2 million be the monthly user count. Now will you explain your estimate methodology?
At this point I doubt that you will. You seem to be very committed to avoiding the question, even though I've granted the assumption that you wanted.
As a Mastodon user myself, I don't find these low-content, context-free, analysis-free Mastodon stat post submissions to HN to be useful. It's just an excuse for people to argue.
I'm not even sure why people need to argue about this. If you want to use Mastodon, then do it, and if you don't want to use Mastodon, then don't. Is anyone forcing you? It's a personal choice. And no, Mastodon will never replace Twitter for hundreds of millions of people; it was never designed to do so. Mastodon vs. Twitter is a false dichotomy. It's more like Twitter vs. itself, Twitter vs. not-Twitter. From my own perspective, Mastodon is simply a place I happened to go after I already decided to stop using Twitter.
I suspect that to a large extent, arguing Twitter vs. Mastodon is only a proxy for arguing for or against the new owner of Twitter, and this argument has been rehashed ad infinitum on HN from various angles.
It's weird - there was a lot of support on HN for Mastodon before Elon Musk took over Twitter, albeit in the midst of a lot of criticism, mostly about UX. Now that the narrative of people fleeing Twitter because of Elon seems to dominate discussion, it seems like everyone wants to double down on hating it or dismissing it. Even with evidence that Mastodon's UX problems aren't insurmountable, everyone still wants to call code on Mastodon and declare it dead.
You'd think more people would be happy that the FAANG hegemony is being broken, at least a little, but I guess not.
There is a very simple answer to this. The people that were leaving Twitter went to Mastodon and found it unsuitable. It's not that people who were cheerleading Mastodon turned coat or went away, they just got outnumbered.
It wasn't about why I hate Musk or Mastodon. Your claim was that if you argue against Mastodon, you're actually just a Musk lover, or if you argue for Mastodon, you just do it because you hate Musk. I can dislike Musk and think that he's making Twitter worse, and still think that Mastodon is a shitty social network. Those things are not related. But if I dislike both, I'm supposed to not "argue Twitter vs. Mastodon"? It doesn't make any sense.
> Your claim was that if you argue against Mastodon, you're actually just a Musk lover, or if you argue for Mastodon, you just do it because you hate Musk.
No, my claim was specifically about "arguing Twitter vs. Mastodon".
> Those things are not related.
Exactly! That's my point. They are entirely separate issues that are too often conflated.
> But if I dislike both, I'm supposed to not "argue Twitter vs. Mastodon"? It doesn't make any sense.
If you dislike both, then it doesn't make any sense to argue Twitter vs. Mastodon. It's a false dichotomy.
Another factor is that protocols propagate much slower than individual pieces of software
Email, the thing with the "@" symbol, was invented in 1971. Most people did not use it until 30 years later.
ActivityPub, the thing with the two "@" symbols, is now 5 years old. If we assume it will propagate twice as fast as email, it will take another 10 years until it hits the mainstream.
Calling it now: long-lived assistant personas that hold context for years at a time. "@engineering@orgdomain@openai.com where can I find the Frobber service documentation?"
On the other hand, Twitter basically predated smartphones and tablets. I recall a time when you had to use WAP to read and SMS to send tweets. To avoid absurd fees, most people would only use internet on their stationary computer. Compare it with today when there are supposedly 7 billion smartphones while most colleagues seem to use them 24/7.
it's fair to note that the Fediverse is much older than the AP protocol. It originally came up through a duo of protocols, OStatus and the Diaspora protocol.
Before Mastodon we had Status.net, Identi.ca, and GNU Social.
Took a look at pixelfed and it seems fascinating. I have no interest in leaving Twitter for Mastodon, but I'm desperately looking for an Instagram alternative.
I wonder if pixelfed is going to have storage issues someday with the videos uploaded. I guess its dependent on the server but pixelfed.social is the only one with a large userbase.
And anecdotally, I find the amount of discourse just the right fit for my needs
I’m on a server with similar enough people and between the list of people I’m following and the “local” timeline for my server, I have a healthy stream of nerdiness and silliness.
So far, the biggest problem is the UX. Following someone from another server is not one click away. Until it's resolved, it will not gain mainstream acceptance.
I think most people will use Mastodon and Twitter through their respective apps (or different apps om the case of Mastodon). Inside the app, following people isn't really that different from following people on Twitter.
I do think Mastodon can use a better follow button, though, but I don't know how to really do that without a browser extension that can access arbitrary websites (aka "a bad idea").
I know web applications can register protocol handlers, so perhaps an web+activitypub:// protocol combined with installing such a handler upon login at one's home server might help? Of course Safari doesn't implement this, but all other desktop browsers do and on mobile you can just use the apps.
I think the web-based protocol is the correct solution. Unfortunately it has been shot down already in Mastodon github issues, so another fedi project would have to take up the mantle on solving this.
Akkoma has 'Remote Follow' which uses an OAuth flow to execute the follow action on your home server. I think that's too heavy of a solution but it is pretty decent UX. Definitely better than Mastodon's which primarily prompts you to 'Sign in' 'On this server'. That's almost never relevant to the user and should not be the primary prompt when you click Follow.
> I do think Mastodon can use a better follow button
Mangane (fork of Soapbox) UI running on my Akkoma instance is a two-click follow - click on the username, click on the follow button (which isn't wildly different to Twitter, technically - one click on the three dot menu, one click to follow; only difference is that you don't leave the tweet you're looking at.) Should imagine some JS/UI whizzkid could replicate the three dot menu and copy the follow (mute, etc.) functionality there (alas, this is far beyond my skillset.)
When I click on the follow button on your instance, I get asked for my account ID.
The problem isn't the follow button when browsing within your home instance, it's when you get linked to someone else's account on their home server and want to follow them.
In the Mastodon web UI for interesting people that pop into your timeline (via boosts/retweets) it is 2 clicks, go-to-profile + follow. Some clients have it as one click directly from the timeline. That is hardly a high UX barrier. OTOH when I am in Twitter UI I am always surprised how cluttered it is by Twitter recommending me all kinds of people I should be interested in somehow. Any UX takes a bit of time to get familiarized to, and then you no long notice its warts so much.
I disagree, this is a problem that needs solving. Clicking the link on my phone brought up Mastodon's web interface (which is fine) but there's no way for me to easily follow this account. My phone doesn't prompt me to open the link in an app because those prompts are domain based and the follow button showed me a whole bunch of text and instructions to copy/paste something somewhere else.
It's perfectly understandable to me, but it's also not exactly great UI design.
There have been proposals to use a custom URL scheme to accomplish this (you don't need the link to point to the person's home domain at all), but they were shot down by Mastodon lead Eugen due to browser support and UX concerns. I think that is a mistake and it needs to be looked at more seriously. Perhaps another fedi software project will adopt a useful standard and then Mastodon can follow after the kinks are worked out.
Most people don't use a standing desk. Despite health benefits such as reducing back pain, improving posture, and reducing the risk of obesity and other chronic diseases.
Standing desks and bookmarklets are both cool things that should definitely exist, I'm not knocking either of them.
But if software has a UX problem and the only viable solution requires copying snippets of code around, then that is a reasonable criticism of the software.
It used to be. Mastodon removed it when they rewrote their entire UI in React in favor of their current messy "copy-paste a url into search" setup.
The old follow button would just open a popup where you entered your home instance + username. It would then redirect you to your instance (not needing a sign in cuz you're already logged in on that) and your instance would do all the magic for following.
I think this is really overblown. It only matters when you see someone's handle posted elsewhere. When you discover them naturally in your timeline you can just follow them. It could be solved with a new URL protocol scheme easily (instead of linking to your account on your home server, create a link to your handle on its own: fedi://@myname@myserver.place)
The reason it's confusing currently is that people link to their home server, which is not useful to someone trying to follow them.
Is there some tutorial about Fediverse for organizations, in a way that is really simple for non-experts?
I mainly use Twitter for town-level information (as a glorified RSS), and the local administration barely masters Twitter, let alone more complex tools. But if there is a simple way to copy their messages towards the Fediverse, that could help bootstrap it.
There are various tools that will mirror tweets to Mastodon. Many of them worked the other way around (replicating Mastodon posts on Twitter) but with the ridiculous pricing Twitter asks for API access I doubt they'll still work in a few months. There's also a tool that will directly mirror RSS into Mastodon, so if that's the source of your tweets then you're in luck.
There's also a decent, chance your posts are already readable on Mastodon through https://bird.makeup/. I wouldn't use that as an official source, but it's probably good to know about. It should also be noted that some servers block dedicated Twitter forwarding services like these because of the massive moderation task blindly forwarding the Twitter cesspool can cause.
I can't tell you what tool or program suits your needs most. There are systems ranging from fully custom ActivityPub servers to simple set-and-forget IFTT automations (https://ifttt.com/explore/how-to-crosspost-mastodon-twitter) that can solve the problem of "post the same stuff on two platforms". Sadly, the most easy to use tools that I know of are useless without access to the Twitter API and I doubt you'll be willing to spend the ridiculous amounts of money Twitter demands for that for a few replicated tweets.
As far as simple guides, everyone has their own idea of what "simple" means. In its most basic form, you type or paste text into an input field and hit the send button, just like on Twitter. You give people your username to follow (@user@server.com),they type that into their dashboard and they hit the follow button. If you want to reply to people, you click the reply button and type a reply. Retweeting and liking works the same way as on Twitter, with similar icons. Usernames are a bit longer because they include a domain name, but honestly who even cares about usernames on social media.
If you've ever emailed someone outside your organisation, using Mastodon shouldn't be harder than using Twitter. The hard part is synchronising the two, because the only people who have put effort into that so far either used the Twitter API or are comfortable with running shell scripts.
Information is dispersed, and created by many independent volunteer initiatives. A lot of info is in all kinds of blog posts, so some internet search may find good input. There's the "Increasingly less brief guide to Mastodon" at http://guidetomastodon.com, by @Noelle@elekk.xyz and sites like https://fediverse.info and https://fediverse.party provide overviews. At https://delightful.club you find curated lists of fediverse app, client and developer projects.
Huh, wonder what happened in January. It returned almost to pre-Musk growth rates for a month, then resumed extremely rapid growth.
Also somewhat surprised there wasn't more of a spike in April 2022; IIRC that's when Musk made his offer and it's certainly when I started un-mothballing my old mastodon account.
I can't help it, the name always triggers me. The first association I have with this name is "a social network built especially to be controllable by the feds."
The "web" also doesn't sound so appetizing, esp. for people with arachnophobia. At least it is short. "Internet" is a rather technical sounding name. Metaverse? For people who want to be all meta? Or subjects of Meta? Once you get used to a name, it doesn't sound so strange anymore.
Sure, if you hear something often enough, it stops being special. However, I don't think I will get particularily used to it, because I am likely not going to have any contact with it. FaceBook is the last platform I have. All the hip new stuff like TikTok, Instagram and whatnot can stay where they are. I learnt my lesson in the few months that I happened to be on Twitter. I can see 1000 other things I'd prefer doing over scrolling through one of these modern depressants.
I never used Facebook and Instagram, yet am used to the names. "Face book", a book of faces? "Insta gram", hmm instant telegrams, old-fashioned? They are equally weird imho.
I consider myself somewhat plugged into social media (Twitter, Insta, Tiktok, etc). But I admit I didn't know what Fediverse was and though it was some kind of government project, maybe for contractors to share documents relating to grants.
Still don't understand the connection between "Fed" and "Mastodon". I think a Mastodon-based social network should be called "Tuskverse" or "Pachyverse" or "Stompverse"
The connection is that Mastodon is just one of the "applications" built on top of ActivityPub protocol. Others are Pixelfed, Pleroma, Peertube, Writefreely, and several more.
Being based on the same protocol, they are all to some extent interoperable - e.g. you can follow Pixelfed users from your Mastodon account.
"Fediverse" is the umbrella term for all of these applications working together. It is a portmanteau for "federated" and "universe". The "federal police" association is unfortunate, but it is something USA only - rest of the world doesn't really see this.
It doesn't hold a monopoly on the concept of a federation, but it does (as far as I know) hold a monopoly on the association of "fed" = (federal) police in people's minds.
Intriguingly, "fed" is British youth slang for the police despite Britain not being a federal state and there being very few national police. A US cultural import, presumably.
Yeah it bothered me at first too. A relic of the euro-centric history of the network. It helps (marginally) to think of it like Star Trek's Federation.
We will never be able to accurately count the number of messages on the Fediverse so this likely happened earlier. We will always under count because some servers don't report statistics and we may not even be counting all the servers.
I say this as someone who has spent time trying to measure these things and has written a fair bit of software attempting to measure things like this.
> ...We will never be able to accurately count the number of messages on the Fediverse...
In many ways, I hope that blindness continues...While i know my opinion there hurts valid research studies (and any stats work like yourself might conduct - sorry about that!), I think the pseudo-privacy that the network affords is worth the likelihood that any data set is only a fraction of the true numbers. My intent is not to be flippant....i just really value this nebulous aspect of the network...Like someone who values their small town feel (warts and all), and dislikes Big City folks who charge into said fictional small town trying to change things that may not need changing. (Not saying you or other researchers do so...just using a cheesy analogy)
What is the point of these vain/vanity numbers? This is like saying "I read 50 books last year" - ok, so? One great book is better than a million shitty books. Enjoying/understanding/implementing the learnings from one book is better than reading a thousand books for reading sake.
How many of these posts are non-spam, useful etc?
Shouldn't we measuring usefulness of info, friendships formed, partnerships created, things learned etc? Though I don't know how to measure any of these, or if it is even possible.
9 times out of 10, this "data driven" stuff is just useless and annoying
I think it's a somewhat useful proxy. You can't measure "friendships formed", so you find something you can measure that hopefully correlates with "friendships formed".
As you point out, it's not without it's flaws, but I think most people would say that some data is better than none.
Unless the Fediverse sorts their censorship issues out, it's not going to get anywhere near as much usage as Twitter. If you don't follow a very narrow political viewpoint then you'll almost certainly get banned from whatever server you signed up for.
They all enforce this on each other as well, with a shared block list of servers on which the operators allow users to say things outside of this narrow political viewpoint.
This sort of restriction on speech isn't conducive to a healthy community where ideas and thoughts can be shared freely. Instead it's more like an authoritarian state where you have to be super careful about what you say, under threat of exile.
> This sort of restriction on speech isn't conducive to a healthy community where ideas and thoughts can be shared freely.
I disagree with your overall take for a few reasons. Some of the best forums on the Internet in the days of yore were heavily moderated. Some of the best subreddits are the most heavily moderated (AskHistorians is the example people provide routinely).
Not every place should be about an open free speech debate about everything. Having topic-focused spaces is perfectly reasonable and you as the user are owed nothing if you join one and start posting off-topic content.
I wrote about this a few years ago, when Wil Wheaton tried to move to Mastodon, and promptly got booted from his instance by a mob.
The "heavy moderation" of IRC days is markedly different than the "heavy moderation" that exists today. Back in the day, the ircops had all the power of the ban hammer. Today, the mob has all the power, and overwhelm the admins.
The mods try to hold onto a semblance of power by pointing to a strict set of rules and codes of conduct, but the reality is the mob gets the final say in who stays or goes, regardless of what the "rules" say.
The Wil Wheaton example is actually something that absolutely could have happened in the IRC days - a big mob flooding another channel to ban user X could lead an oper to decide the same thing (this was in fact the source of much drama back in my EFNet days).
There's nothing stopping a moderator/operator from simply blocking accounts on-instance who are erroneously flagging/reporting people.
There's also nothing stopping Wil Wheaton from finding a more sympathetic server admin or starting his own Fediverse server instances and ignoring people reporting his accounts (see also: Kevin Beaumont).
Dude it's an open protocol. You wanna dunk on the libs? Spin up a server. Presumably if you're on HN long enough to want to make a new account solely to bitch about the Fediverse's overall political stance then you have the skills to run one. Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey, whatever, as long as it speaks ActivityPub it's on the Fediverse. Find new people who feel the same way by using #fediblock as a suggestion of people to follow, instead of people to block.
But the Fediverse is not one monolithic network. And nobody is obligated to listen to a single thing you say. So if you start hassling a bunch of people who are there to talk to their friends while also being openly queer, non-white, and liberal, then you'll start racking up the blocks. Keeping a community healthy involves kicking out people who want to destroy it, too.
If you’re on HN long enough you should know of a superior protocol called Nostr that doesn’t tie your identity to Federated servers.
By tying each individual to a server you are allowing cancel by association culture. Individuals should not be put in left/right buckets (or any other buckets) and have that association be used to censor/exclude them. The structure of the Fediverse encourages in/out groups. That’s why it sucks, and that’s why giving individuals the power over their own identity will be the future of social.
Honey, I run a Mastodon. At least half of the server blocks I do come from my users saying "hey have you seen this post on #fediblock yet". If I stopped dealing with that stuff, my users would migrate their accounts (and their donations for the server upkeep) to another server that's better at keeping up with that. They've got "power over their own identity" without having to deal with the network effects of using Yet Another Social Media Protocol that's completely incompatible with existing open protocols; part of their power over their identity includes delegating me as the social plumber who maintains the Asshole Filter on our social space.
It's pretty hard to avoid putting individuals into any buckets whatsoever. How do I discover community on Nostr? I connected to a few relays but nothing seems to be themed or organized around interests. On Akkoma I can make friends with people on my local server and sibling servers in our Bubble so it's very easy. Focusing on an independent identity at the expense of any kind of association is not particularly appealing to me. I'm not surprised it has tended to attract individualists in the crypto and libertarian crowds with those design priorities.
Nothing stops you from running your own instance for people who want to share the same ideas or want less stringent moderation. Freedom goes both ways: It includes others right to not want to deal with you. Just like Gab and Truth Social who both runs Mastodon have either wholly or mostly defederated.
And as it happens the reason most Mastodon instances are moderated the way they are is that their users demand it.
Mastodon and Pleroma seem to have just soaked up the worst of the Fediverse. Most of the big Mastodon servers are MASSIVE echo chambers. I didn't check Pleroma as much, but the ones that I did were the same, but with an "I live in a basement and make white genocide infographics all day long" flavor.
I've seen hobby chats that do not actually discuss the hobby they're designed for, because the keyboard warriors moderating the place have decided that their political flavor of the month is more important. It's not a healthy atmosphere for discussion, but it's the dominant one across the platform. And you WILL be aggressively blocked if you do not fit into it.
Peertube and Pixelfed have fared so much better, I guess because the SocMed(tm) format is inherently designed around creating a bubble.
Exactly my problem, I thought I had found a decent topic-focused instance, and then the local feed was dominated by one guy being pretty much who I didn't use twitter because of. I can block him, of course, but I'd rather we be able to talk about the techy stuff I signed up for.
It is hyperbole, correct. It is the exact same hyperbole as you saying "a very narrow political viewpoint". No more than what you gave.
Now I don't know and don't want to know what opinions you are referring to, but based on my experience of mastodon, that "very narrow" characterisation is very much false.
BTW, I also disagree with you on what "the problem" is.
Not following a proscribed political viewpoint is now "extremist trolling". Yeesh!
Some of these points aren't even controversial to most people in the real world, just on the Internet. See: men in women's sports. Go and ask a random person in real life what they think and then compare that with the Fediverse.
Is that viewpoint "extremist trolling"? I don't think so, personally. You've just assumed the parent must be a horrendous person with horrendous viewpoints. But you actually haven't read them.
Here's some rules:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
The idea that "the fediverse", an inherently decentralised network even has "a proscribed political viewpoint" is extremist and troll-y, yes. it is the technique of skating right over the bad-faith misframing of the issue in the hopes that we go along with it.
> You've just assumed the parent must be a horrendous person with horrendous viewpoints
> The growth-hacking folks around here should realize that from the perspective of the Fediverse there is no such "contest". This is probably the biggest difference why Twitter is by no means an alternative to Mastodon. There's no need to grow at all costs, move fast and break things, do crazy things to get engagement levels up, no commercial incentives, valuations, VC and shareholders to satisfy. The Fediverse is a network created by people, for people, and it is noticeable in the culture.. if you stop the frantic growth-hacking and take the time to discover it.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35584385