![Lvxferre [he/him]](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/333d03a0-bcae-434b-a8d1-7dfd18962d20.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
Why is Mastodon struggling to survive?
Context for other users - the user above is likely referring to the Gartner cycle:
As anyone here can see, it looks nothing like that pattern that I've highlighted.
If the success condition for Mastodon is "to become a long-term viable and attractive alternative to corporate-owned microblogging", then improvements of the platform are necessary.
To be clear on my opinion in this matter: I want to see Mastodon to succeed, I want to see X and Threads closing down, and IDGAF about Bluesky. However I'm not too eager to engage in wishful belief and pretend that everything is fine - because acknowledging the problem is always the first step to solve it.
First, I will accept the data of the chart at face value, it seems resonably accurate and I don’t have any other data to work off of.
If you do find another source of data, please post it. Relying on a single source (like the Fediverse Observer) is problematic, I know.
To me the declining slopes after the sruges are not relevant to any long term conclusions, they follow a highly predictable curve and doesn’t mean much.
You're conflating the sharp drops after the surges with the declining slopes.
The sharp drops (like MAU from 12/2022 to 02/2023) go as you said, they don't mean much. However, the declining slopes are relevant - they span across multiple months (up to ten), and show that Mastodon userbase has a consistent tendency to shrink.
If you look at the end of the graphs you can even see it growing slightly, that is obviously not evidence of anything yet, but to me it is an indication of either a start of another surge, or stability.
We'll only know if it's an indication of a surge (sudden influx of new users), or growth (slow influx), or stability in the future. For now it's an isolated data point.
I believe you are too quick at spreading doom for Mastodon
I'm saying that Mastodon is struggling. I did not say that Mastodon is doomed.
The difference is important here because a struggling network can be still saved, while a doomed one can't.
Let's see:
Network effect hits Mastodon specially hard as it competes not just with Twitter, but also Threads and Bluesky. In those situations, a smaller userbase means that people will outright ignore you as an option.
The way that federation was implemented; as linearchaos mentioned in another thread, if you settle in a smaller instance (the "right" thing to do), you won't get "good collections of off node traffic". So it creates a situation where, if you know how federation works you'll avoid big instances, and worsen your own experience; and if you don't, well, Mastodon's big selling point goes down the drain.
Federation itself introduces a complexity cost. That's unavoidable and the benefits of federation outweigh the cost by far; however, the cost is concrete while the bigger benefit is far more abstract.
Branding issues. Other users already mentioned it, but you don't sell a novel tech named after an extinct animal.
And this is just conjecture from my part, but I think that microblogging is becoming less popular than it used to be; people who like short content would rather go watch a TikTok video, and people who want well-thought content already would rather read a "proper" blog instead.
On a lighter side: the very fact that we're using the ActivityPub now helps Mastodon, even if we're in different platforms (like Lemmy, MBin, PieFed, SubLinks). Due to how federation works, you're bound to see someone in Mastodon sharing content with those forums and vice versa; it could be a bit less clunky but it's still more content for both sides.
On the text: I think that the author reached the right conclusion through the wrong reasoning. The activity peaks don't matter that much, when there's a huge influx of users you're bound to see some leaving five minutes later. The reason why Mastodon is struggling is this:
See those slopes down? They show that the stable userbase is shrinking. Even users engaged enough with the platform are slowly leaving, but newbies who could fill their place aren't popping up.
I don't know. Instead I'll focus on my subjective experience with comics and manga, as a nobody from LatAm who likes fantasy.
Manga is something that I grew up with. As adulthood came by, I didn't feel the need to ditch it - instead I found other manga series to enjoy. There's stuff for young kids and adults; spicy and tame; comedic and serious; romance and no romance. No matter who you are and the stuff that you like, I feel like you could find at least one enjoyable manga series to read.
In the meantime, what I've found from comics elsewhere:
- Local (at least in Brazil) - either tailored for kids (see: Monica's Gang) or newspaper 4-koma with social commentary (see: anything from Glauco). So only kids get actual stories? Based on Mafalda I feel like that's how the cookie crumbles in Latin America as a whole.
- European - wider in age demographic than the local ones, and some do have fantasy (Even erotica. Druuna, I'm looking at you.
And your butt.), but I feel like they lack dynamic. Even adventure ones like Tintin. Still enjoyable to read, but sometimes my cup of tea might be yerba or coffee, you know? - United-Statian - Mary Sue protag got superpowers from Z'bh'thy, and now is fighting the Evil for the sake of their country. Skip past 20 years and they're still in the same slop, never reaching the end, in a multiverse that makes my PC cabling look tidy in comparison.
- manhua (China) - I actually found quite a few enjoyable series (like the Fairy Captivity, Yaoguai Mingdan, My Wife is the Demon Queen). Perhaps not surprisingly they're similar in spirit to Japanese manga. I could see myself reading more of that stuff. (I'll skip wuxia though.)
- manhwa (S. Korea) - 90% of the stuff that I've seen boils down to either "adultery stories" (I'm not into that stuff) or what feels like ultra-shōnen: "level ZZ is not enough, MC needs to reach level ZZZ". That said I did find a few enjoyable series, like FFF-Trashero or Carnivorous Princess Yegrinna.
Are they always like this? Probably not; I bet that people can find exceptions to every single bullet point that I've listed.
Something must be also said about the synergy between light novels, manga, and anime: if you want you get to enjoy the same story thrice, in three different media, and the pleasure associated with each will be different. And if the story is good enough it won't tire you down. I simply don't feel the same in non-Japanese series, even the ones that adapt the same universe across different media (like X-Men).
Farofa with nuts! (It's actually tasty. Specially with walnuts, bacon, and raisins. I wouldn't be preparing it if senile though - I'd completely forget about Christmas.)
Yup, we are growing. It isn't just in number of users, or their activity here, but also in the number of platforms using the protocol - and that's one of the things that the ActivityPub developers did really right: they picked the concept of federation from earlier protocols/standards (like OStatus), and made it usable for more than just microblogging. The impact of that is twofold:
- future-proofing the protocol. Even if microblogging were to fade away, as a trend, the protocol would still survive.
- older platforms push new ones up, even if the new ones are something completely novel.
(I also like chatting with you!)
Probably eggs farofa.
That bloody wiki farm is so user-hostile that there's at least one extension redirecting its traffic to wikis elsewhere.
I'm not sure if the analogy with communism holds well, as communism implies post-scarcity. Perhaps socialism - if you see the current AP protocol as the Soviet economy from 1918 to 22, my proposal is basically a Lenin style New Economic Policy: a step back (less federation) to take two steps forward later (federation growth).
As for the mirrors, secondary (as in backup) would be a good analogy; their main reason to exist would be to make admins+mods accountable. ("Why did you remove [content]? It's within the rules, even if you disagree with it!"). And ideally it should be possible for a single mirror to work for multiple instances, specially smaller ones. In the meantime, the actual (non-mirror) instances would be on equal grounds.
In contrast, ActivityPub [...]
As far as I know, as someone who didn't read the source either, that's accurate. aussie.zone is basically mirroring the content of federated instances, to service its users, then when some aussie.zone user posts something there the other instances mirror it.
On the other hand, there’s nothing stopping someone from not respecting the deletion requests, and instead highlighting that content, in the current Lemmy framework. It would definitely be a deviation from the standard codebase though. And therefore every time there’s an update or patch, there would have to be a merge event to keep that feature functional.
In theory, there isn't. In practice:
- AFAIK this is not something that Lemmy or Mastodon were coded for. It's unsupported so the person doing it would need to maintain their own fork of the relevant software.
- This becomes specially problematic once users from the non-deleting instance interact with content that, for other instances, has been deleted.
I wonder if the reason your idea is not done is bc it relies too much on “trusting” the client for security reasons? Although… tbf I’m not certain how much that would differ from how things are now.
If I had to take a guess, the reason why W3C, Lemmer-Webber and Prodromou created the AP the current way is because, while you're raising a baby, you never know the growing pains that it'll have as a teen.
Ease discovery of federated communities has been funded: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-09-11_-_New_NLnet_funding_for_Lemmy
That's some great news! It's great to see that the issues are being ironed out.
Redundancy is better handled through specialised mirrors, similar in spirit to reveddit. That would be even more transparent than the current system - as the mirrors could translate actions like content removal into content highlighting, so it would stick out like a sore thumb. This would also throw the burden associated with redundancy (transmission, storage, removal of clearly illegal content) into a few machines, instead of the whole network.
I'm aware that it's a weaker form of federation than the current one but, as long as the front-end handles simultaneous multi-account and merges the feeds of the instances that you're registered to, it's already addressing the main needs:
- users can see content from multiple places without registering individually to each
- users don't need to see what they don't want to
- content is still spread out, so no instance controls the whole
- admins still have control over who accesses their own instance (through defederation + banning).
currently you can only find a piece of removed content if you know that it exists.
I feel like ActivityPub implemented federation in a really weird way, and that's what causes problems like @linearchaos@lemmy.world is reporting, or the issue that Blaze is addressing through multi-accounting. Perhaps we shouldn't be sharing content across instances but only credentials.
For example. If you're registered to instance A, and B federates with A, then B would let you post from your A account as if you were registered to B. Then let the retrieval of the content of different instances up to the front-end, instead of mirroring it.
A lot of this boils down to consequences of lemmy.world being the largest instance: typical Reddit users beeline for it, trolls go there, larger comms so more frequent issues with moderation, people who fail to distinguish between "we shouldn't concentrate our activity into the largest instance" and "largest instance bad! EDIT WOW THANKS FOR LE GOLD TO LE KNEE KIND STRANGER!", so goes on.
It's in Italian. I should've changed it before the screenshot, but it takes effort to do so, and I'm lazy.
My computer settings are all in Italian, to avoid getting rusty with the language. Sabe como é - não usa, enferruja.
He's a jumento / donkey and a piece of shit on moral and ethical grounds; he doesn't give a flying fuck about the population, and seems to have a burning hate against marginalised groups. However, he isn't too prone to shoot his own feet.
This is relevant in this case because social media is essential for what he's doing: gathering support for his meat puppet's potential election, while playing the victim of an anti-democratic government. "Poor me, I was unjustly prevented from being a candidate! The powers to be don't want me to! Vote on $person by the way." As such his interests align really well with Musk.
My hypothesis:
Meta is one of those companies wallowing in the idiotic belief that generative AI will "soon" reach intelligence and sentience and the ability to walk your dog, so odds are that it's deploying them heavily for moderation duties. Except that the crap does not understand a single iot of the pictures and text that it analyses, so it's bound to get huge amounts of false positives and false negatives.
Well, here's an example of false positive. i.e. machine mod assuming that the poster is underageb&.
Protip: if you use "assumer machine" to handle people, you're trash, your service is trash, and you both deserve to be treated as trash. Not this conclusion is surprising regarding Meta.
Would
Fight it? Bad idea. That's the wandering spider's way to say "back off! I'm going to jump on your face, bite you, and you'll die an agonising death! I'm serious!!"
[Still cute though. At least from a distance.]
This is the first real meal I had in years.
Said someone who lives off popcorn! 🍿
I'm not judging you though. I used to love this sort of drama. (I still do, a bit.)
A model that explains well half of the data is as useful as a coin toss. But let's roll with it, and pretend that we got two superimposed Gartner cycles here.
The trough would be reached after a sharp drop after the peak, and based on the first peak it would be ~2 months long. That would explain only the period between 2023-07 and 2023-09; the rest of what I've pointed out in red is clearly something else, the nearest of what they look like would be a sick version of the "slope of enlightenment" - going down instead of up.
Yeah, the model doesn't work.
A better way to approach this is to consider three things:
Once you notice those things, it gets really easy to explain what's happening:
By analysing the data this way, not just we're describing it better, but we can also see where Mastodon needs to improve:
What I'm saying also partially applies to the "Fediverse link aggregators", like Lemmy. Lemmy does show some tendency to bleed users, but in smaller degree than Mastodon; but it's in a better position because there's only one big competitor, and it keeps fucking it up over and over.