I‘m not sure if it‘s only me — and this should be by no means coming across as trolling — but am I the only one who thinks that Mastodon already lost the race when it started, because of its very...
I‘m not sure if it‘s only me — and this should be by no means coming across as trolling — but am I the only one who thinks that Mastodon already lost the race when it started, because of its very unappealing name? The name just sounds horrific to my ears, like something that needs to be avoided. Possibly because I‘m not a native English speaker.
Besides that, it also just felt too complicated for non techies to grasp the whole thing. Most people surely just want to download an app and start using it without thinking about servers and such.
Bluesky does both of those things better: it has a very attractive name and is dead simple to sign up, yet it still has all the advantages of a foundation which allows federation.
Unappealing name? Mastodon is one of the funniest words in the English language once you know its backstory. Mastos + Odont Mastos means breast, and Odont means tooth. Breast tooth. Why is it...
Unappealing name? Mastodon is one of the funniest words in the English language once you know its backstory.
Mastos + Odont
Mastos means breast, and Odont means tooth. Breast tooth. Why is it called that? Because some smart people a long time ago thought that the protrusions on mastodon teeth looked like little nipples. Seriously.
I used to work at a history museum where we would show people the differences between mastodon and mammoth teeth and without fail the nipple-tooth explanation would make people laugh every time.
...honestly I think Mastodon is an even worse name after learning the etymology.
Unappealing name? Mastodon is one of the funniest words in the English language once you know its backstory.
Mastos + Odont
Mastos means breast, and Odont means tooth. Breast tooth. Why is it called that? Because some smart people a long time ago thought that the protrusions on mastodon teeth looked like little nipples
...honestly I think Mastodon is an even worse name after learning the etymology.
To each their own, but I wholeheartedly disagree. If every company/website had a name with a ridiculous etymology, the internet would be a much more interesting place.
To each their own, but I wholeheartedly disagree. If every company/website had a name with a ridiculous etymology, the internet would be a much more interesting place.
Regular people don't really care about word etymology. I agree with theavi, the word just isn't cool sounding. And the meaning people associate with it is something that went extinct, not...
Regular people don't really care about word etymology. I agree with theavi, the word just isn't cool sounding. And the meaning people associate with it is something that went extinct, not something that's the future.
Still, even with a better name it would still have failed. For the same reason Voat failed, and Lemmy failed, and Bluesky is floundering already. If you want to launch a successful new social network, you need to offer something unique and new (for example like Snapchat and Tiktok did). Not just rely on protesters/boycotters.
Also, all that decentralization/federation is just confusing for regular people. Outside of hardcore geeks, nobody really wants it.
Is it? I agree it's no Twitter, but I'd consider it the most successful new social media. I've been consistently surprised how many friends randomly talk about BlueSky. Adding video support when...
Bluesky is floundering already
Is it? I agree it's no Twitter, but I'd consider it the most successful new social media. I've been consistently surprised how many friends randomly talk about BlueSky. Adding video support when the Brazilians joined felt like a turning point.
The decentralization/federation being confusing for newcomers is a very real issue and I can definitely see that hampering the adoption of these new platforms. But honestly, I think the word...
The decentralization/federation being confusing for newcomers is a very real issue and I can definitely see that hampering the adoption of these new platforms. But honestly, I think the word mastodon is pretty cool, regardless of the etymology, and this thread is the first time I have ever considered that other people might find it off-putting. I think the whole extinction connotation might be a bit overblown.
IMO, Bsky has been speedrunning Masto's decline into meta-discussion and hivemind circlejerking. The problem with protestors and boycotters is that they're aren't advertizer-friendly. Worse,...
Not just rely on protesters/boycotters.
IMO, Bsky has been speedrunning Masto's decline into meta-discussion and hivemind circlejerking.
The problem with protestors and boycotters is that they're aren't advertizer-friendly. Worse, they're downright repellant to normies. It's most obvious with Voat and 8chan, but there's plenty of leftist purity-testing that kills migration momentum.
I don't think the issue is necessary (just) the audience, but I think you're getting at one of the root causes. I've mostly stuck to Mastodon and Lemmy recently and haven't used Bluesky. But, my...
The problem with protestors and boycotters is that they're aren't advertizer-friendly
I don't think the issue is necessary (just) the audience, but I think you're getting at one of the root causes. I've mostly stuck to Mastodon and Lemmy recently and haven't used Bluesky. But, my impression is that because these are tools built buy the community for the community, the platforms themselves aren't advertiser-centric. Do they provide key analytics, have sales teams wooing advertisers, provide revenue splits, etc? Would Mastodon or Loops ever have it's own version of the TikTok shop?
When people say they want to be an "influencer," obviously they need an audience to influence. But, also importantly, they want to be able to make money doing it. Why would a wannabe influencer spend their time on a platform that can't easily be monetized, especially without having clear examples of others successfully making a living on that platform?
As a user, it's nice to not be inundated with ads, influencers, misinformation, etc. But, those things are the also some of the growth engines for other networks. [(Additionally, the person who's an annoyance to me on other networks is someone that tens or hundreds of thousands may show up to follow.)]
I don't disagree, especially depending on the instance. My impression is that for established networks, it's on a different level. That may partially be because of the audience, but I wouldn't be...
I don't disagree, especially depending on the instance. My impression is that for established networks, it's on a different level. That may partially be because of the audience, but I wouldn't be shocked if the algorithms (which people can't always opt-out of) encourage these things.
Misinformation just feels like it belongs with the potential downstream effects of prioritizing for engagement/time spent on site over the quality of content or quality of the time spent on site.
Much like the app, it takes effort to appreciate. Most don't want to have to learn Latin or paleontology to get a joke. Most don't want to have to take time and effort to figure out how mastodon...
Much like the app, it takes effort to appreciate.
Most don't want to have to learn Latin or paleontology to get a joke. Most don't want to have to take time and effort to figure out how mastodon works.
Fine for me, I don't need a ton of people on my social media ( hence why I'm here) but I'm wonder if it'll ever reach critical mass with its barriers to entry.
No. People thought that "tweet" was stupid when Twitter was new, and people got over it. It's just that Mastodon didn't have the marketing budget of a real company, and so it couldn't afford that...
am I the only one who thinks that Mastodon already lost the race when it started, because of its very unappealing name?
No. People thought that "tweet" was stupid when Twitter was new, and people got over it. It's just that Mastodon didn't have the marketing budget of a real company, and so it couldn't afford that "cool" or "hip" factor.
The name is a red herring. Mastodon would be in precisely the same spot it is today no matter what it was called.
No, you're right on the money. If anyone ever doubts the importance of good marketing and branding, I'll just point at Mastodon. Technically, a superior product to Bluesky, with actual implemented...
No, you're right on the money. If anyone ever doubts the importance of good marketing and branding, I'll just point at Mastodon. Technically, a superior product to Bluesky, with actual implemented federation that works great. Very smart people. Said smart people were also not able to describe Mastodon to laypeople as "it's like email, you make one and then can talk to anyone with a Mastodon."
In one sentence you've just cleared up a lot of confusion for me about how exactly Mastodon servers worked with each other. Why have I never heard it described like that before‽
"it's like email, you make one and then can talk to anyone with a Mastodon."
In one sentence you've just cleared up a lot of confusion for me about how exactly Mastodon servers worked with each other. Why have I never heard it described like that before‽
Because marketing requires some skills. This is a problem with a great many open source type projects. The engineers are often brilliant and wonderfully-hearted, but they think like engineers at...
Because marketing requires some skills.
This is a problem with a great many open source type projects. The engineers are often brilliant and wonderfully-hearted, but they think like engineers at times they and their projects would be better served to think like communications students.
I don’t know how to solve the problem, but it’s a major barrier to widespread adoption.
I'd say Mastadon itself didn't do the best job describing their service, but they were a) caught off guard by the user influx, and b) were still developing. They weren't really in the place to...
I'd say Mastadon itself didn't do the best job describing their service, but they were a) caught off guard by the user influx, and b) were still developing. They weren't really in the place to suddenly throw their resources into marketing like crazy. The word Mastodon also isn't that gross of a word, though it happened to match the cumbersome nature of setting up an account. Within the general discussion of blame, Mastodon should not get a ton of points docked for being itself.
I do blame everyone that talked up a service when they couldn't descibe how or why they were using it. It reminded me of bitcoin in the early days and how I never once heard any description about wallets or how to use them when asking people or googling around back then. A lot of it just comes down to computer science people in general: they typically have a very hard time describing from the perspective of, or relating to, the common user about how to use a function in its basic form instead of its complicated building blocks. A lot of the time it comes from inexperience in tutoring-like environments, but it doesn't help that some people like to gatekeep knowledge to others as well. Regardless, if someone asks about an app with the full intent to switch out of spite for another platform, and you're unable to convince them in that state? You're unable to give some brief instructions that make someone in active 'i will put effort toward joining another platform' energy not follow through??? I get that not everyone has experience in advertising as well, but come on.
This turned into more of a rant, but I just wanted to voice that while Mastodon didn't play their hand right, the community around it did a great job playing their hand wrong.
unless your mail server is on someone else's block list and they won't accept your mail. Or your mail server is on someone's block list so you won't get their mail.
Yup. A classic case of idealist open software projects shooting themselves in the foot by not realizing that people make decisions emotionally. A lot of unpleasant things go through my head just...
Yup. A classic case of idealist open software projects shooting themselves in the foot by not realizing that people make decisions emotionally. A lot of unpleasant things go through my head just reading the name but certainly reading a “primer” of how mastodon even fucking works, which is not how any other social media app ever worked in this millennium. And the techy idealists crowd (which I’d include myself as being a part of, to a large degree) largely ignored any issues with onboarding and confusion for potential users. Like, almost rolling their eyes at your aunt and uncle not being able to read a short readme.md and do a little research on potential instances. How deluded and out of touch is that? I was a little more open at first because it honestly would have been great if it succeeded, but who are we kidding? It has always been bonkers.
I really wanted a good reddit alternative to come out of the API protests, I was so pissed off when all the geek started pushing another one of those decentralized messes (Lemmy), it was so...
I really wanted a good reddit alternative to come out of the API protests, I was so pissed off when all the geek started pushing another one of those decentralized messes (Lemmy), it was so obvious it was going to fail.
Decentralization seems like a way to have your cake and eat it too. People who are unhappy with Reddit ultimately are extremely different themselves. Some of them want WAY MORE moderation, some of...
Decentralization seems like a way to have your cake and eat it too. People who are unhappy with Reddit ultimately are extremely different themselves. Some of them want WAY MORE moderation, some of them want WAY LESS moderation. That's not really reconcilable on a single platform.
That's the problem when you rely on protesters to build your social network in the first place. Most people are there just to complain about the website they left, and as you mentioned they can't...
That's the problem when you rely on protesters to build your social network in the first place. Most people are there just to complain about the website they left, and as you mentioned they can't even agree on what the new website should be like.
In the meantime, snapchat was like "hey, we'll make your posts temporary and give you cool filters", and everyone was like "fuck yeah!" Same goes for tiktok - nobody was catering to people who wanted shorts, especially after vine died. Add a really good algorithm, and you get something people actually want, not just a place where you go to protest a different website.
Bluesky is dead simple to onboard because it’s not federated/descentralized, no matter what they say. It’s so not descentralized that a group of experts is trying to raise USD 30 mi to turn it,...
Bluesky is dead simple to onboard because it’s not federated/descentralized, no matter what they say. It’s so not descentralized that a group of experts is trying to raise USD 30 mi to turn it, which is bonkers considering we already have a descentralized social platform/protocol — ActivityPub.
This feels a bit like a "mountain comes to Mohammed" thing though - there's no point building the perfect decentralised protocol if it being decentralised makes it so difficult to use that people...
This feels a bit like a "mountain comes to Mohammed" thing though - there's no point building the perfect decentralised protocol if it being decentralised makes it so difficult to use that people avoid it. If the goal here is to build something decentralised and popular, then starting where the people are and working from there seems like a pretty sensible approach.
I also think claims that ActivityPub is the only true decentralised protocol are kind of absurd, given the top-heavy nature of it. It is decentralised in the same way that email is, which is to say that it isn't - it is dominated by a smaller number of big servers, and if it becomes more mainstream, that effect will only get worse, in exactly the same way that most people use Google or Microsoft for email, and you have an inordinate number of hoops to jump through if you want to do your own thing.
The analogy with email's big servers isn't fair. You can spin up an ActivityPub server and immediately start talking to anyone; with email, this is way harder due to spam mitigations (DKIM, new...
The analogy with email's big servers isn't fair. You can spin up an ActivityPub server and immediately start talking to anyone; with email, this is way harder due to spam mitigations (DKIM, new domains policies, spam lists etc.)
I guess pretty much everyone did a terrible job in October 2022, when people were avid for a Twitter alternative and Mastodon was ready. By focusing on instances and decentralization, we gave Mastodon/decentralized social media a bad reputation. Nowadays, when someone shows interest in fediverse and asks for advice, all I say is “start an account on mastodon.social and be happy”. After testing the waters, they can learn the details and move on to another/smaller/own instance down the road.
In this path (“start an account on mastodon.social and be happy”), I can't tell in what sense Mastodon is more difficult to use than Bluesky.
About twenty or thirty years so you could do exactly the same with email. Then everyone got an email address, spam became the nightmare that it is today, and so major email providers started...
About twenty or thirty years so you could do exactly the same with email. Then everyone got an email address, spam became the nightmare that it is today, and so major email providers started aggressively blocking (one might say defederating) bad servers, to the point where it became quite difficult to stay in the good books of those providers. That's all stuff that can happen in the Fediverse, and is very likely to happen if it becomes popular.
I think there's a certain extent to which perfect is the enemy of good, and there will surely never be a perfect distributed social media system because the two concepts are fundamentally at odds with each other. But then we end up in the same place we were before: ATProto and ActivityPub are both imperfect protocols, but one of them has lots of activity and buzz, and the other does not - Mohammed must go to the mountain and all that.
Of course this isn't the only consideration, and I also get the impression that ATProto is also a protocol designed with a certain amount of hindsight based on real experiences at Twitter and the strengths and weaknesses of ActivityPub. I'm not entirely sure on the details, but I get the impression that they've tried to make more operations push-based rather than pull-based, which allows more efficient communication between nodes. This comes at the cost of requiring more resources, which means it will be harder to run a node, but like I said before federated systems are always going to be largely centralised around a few main nodes, and I suspect it's better to optimise for federating between those larger nodes (and therefore removing the walled garden effect of something like Twitter or Facebook) rather than optimising for every individual being able to host their own system (which will never happen, see again email).
That is very funny to me because I live in an area where mastodon is part of the name of lots of businesses and little league team names and such. I thought the name was incredibly generic.
The name just sounds horrific to my ears, like something that needs to be avoided. Possibly because I‘m not a native English speaker.
That is very funny to me because I live in an area where mastodon is part of the name of lots of businesses and little league team names and such. I thought the name was incredibly generic.
That’s an interesting take, and of course how the name sounds to different people is really subjective. Personally I like the name. I think elephants are cool and kinda goofy, and big badass...
That’s an interesting take, and of course how the name sounds to different people is really subjective. Personally I like the name. I think elephants are cool and kinda goofy, and big badass prehistoric ones are even cooler. And I guess this terminology isn’t widely known but I love that Mastodon’s equivalent of “tweets” are called “toots.” That’s friggin’ adorable.
I don’t have a horse in this race. I didn’t use Twitter and I’m uninterested in anything like it. If I were to use one I’d gravitate toward the decentralized, FOSS, privacy-oriented one that isn’t run by elites and funded by venture capital.
The thing I know about Mastodon is it’s federated and I love the idea of that. But I’m also intimidated by it because it sounds complex. If I were to start using it, I’d need to develop a mental model of how it works and I (even as a career software engineer) don’t want to do that. I would be joining to chat with people, not to figure out how content is propagated and moderated across a distributed network. Those are implementation details an end user shouldn’t have to contend with— ESPECIALLY for mass adoption.
Anyway, I’ve heard that it’s not really that complicated to use, I dunno. That’s still the impression I have of it. I assume others who have considered it are in a similar boat. That seems like a bigger barrier to me than the branding… overcoming the (appearance of) complexity is a big and important challenge for building a userbase. And I kinda feel like Mastodon has missed its chance. In the early days of Musk-era X chaos, it was as likely a successor as anything else. But they squandered their opportunity and Bluesky snatched it away. I think it’s too late now for Mastodon to reach #1. That ship has sailed.
It's really not so complicated to onboard. If you download the app and sign up that way, it by default offers you @mastodon.social as a server. The rest of the sign up process is essentially...
It's really not so complicated to onboard. If you download the app and sign up that way, it by default offers you @mastodon.social as a server. The rest of the sign up process is essentially identical to Bluesky or Twitter. The most frustrating part of it is wading through yet another list of people to follow, which is pretty much what's kept me from being engaged in the Twitter-like format in the first place.
I have to agree. It's obviously highly subjective, but I abhor "Mastodon" as a name. I'm not entirely sure why - it's a subconscious thing. If I have to put reasons to it, it's some combination of...
I have to agree. It's obviously highly subjective, but I abhor "Mastodon" as a name. I'm not entirely sure why - it's a subconscious thing. If I have to put reasons to it, it's some combination of
It's too many syllables
The components syllables are harsh and "earthy". Compare the number of consonant endings in "Mastodon" and "bluesky".
The imagery of a "mastodon" conjures up something big and bloated. And dead.
Why do we want another social media? IMO it's for discovery. Otherwise we could use Signal, email, Tildes, or any other communication platform. The advantage of Twitter over something like Discord...
Why do we want another social media? IMO it's for discovery.
Otherwise we could use Signal, email, Tildes, or any other communication platform. The advantage of Twitter over something like Discord is that you can discover new posts and people.
Personally, I think BlueSky's architecture and UX is better than Mastodon's. But I think the real goal should be to bridge these platforms (and others), then write shared code for, fund, and promote both of them. For example, a single open client that can create an account on BlueSky or Mastodon or sync one between both. Along with better algorithms and tools for discovery and moderation.
Also, my understanding is that coding a social media is the (relatively) easy part, the hard part is social. Good discovery, moderation, and funding are what make or break a site, and you accomplish these with people: interesting people who create "good vibes", level-headed moderators, and sponsors. The big social medias are entrenched, I don't even think because they have better discovery algorithms or UX, but because they have far more users and moderators. Arguments over what platform, what governance completely sidestep this, the main thing I think the $30 million should be for is to figure out how, and then do, 1) convince people to make interesting things the open web 2) while blocking grifters, trolls, etc.
Excellent point. I agree completely; this argument is fundamentally about choice. My grandma should be able to use Twitter. My weird uncle should be able to use X. My nephew should be able to use...
Excellent point. I agree completely; this argument is fundamentally about choice. My grandma should be able to use Twitter. My weird uncle should be able to use X. My nephew should be able to use Bluesky. And I should be able to use Mastodon. But even more importantly, we should all be able to interact and follow and reply to each other through a common standard! Because they're all at the root level the same.damn.thing.
That's why I use Mastodon. That's why I refuse to use X or Bluesky. Cory Doctorow articulates this well in some recent posts: if the product is entirely controlled by one company, particularly the app experience in thr age of smartphones, you're being held hostage and so is your data. We need interoperable standards so that when Musk buys Twitter and starts pushing his own political agenda we can keep the same identity and follows and followers. That's what Mastodon is all about; the federation isn't the main appeal, it's an implementation detail of the fact that ActivityPub is a standard that gives users freedom to read and write and recommend content however they wish. Exactly like you can do in the real world with a book or an article.
Censorship and moderation is a distraction. If your community shards down to reasonable sizes and a manipulatable algorithm doesn't force-feed 'viral' content to the masses, local communities can self-moderate just fine. The problem comes from scale. Think of it this way: a small town doesn't need a standing police force that patrols the streets aggressively on your typical day. You just need s couple of officers around to respond to calls, anf maybe a tiny bit of proactive policing. But when a total solar eclipse happens and 100x the town's population in tourists shows up in a couple of hours, you damn well better have a bunch of cops to deal with the scaling factor of accidents, troublemakers, and confused tourists who mess up because they don't know the area.
Ghost is starting to take this to an even more interesting level this year, trying to create a one-stop ActivityPub hub in a single (potentially self-hosted) site. That'll let you consume blog posts, microblog posts, image posts, and more (RSS as well, perhaps?) all in a single feed that you run yourself.
RSS and Atom and XMPP and HTTP(S) are the fundamental building blocks of so much on the internet, including these hostage-taking ad-feeding radicalising Skinner boxes we call social media today. We really need a new standard to cover the higher level of abstraction built on top of the existing standards to implement social media. Because interacting with your friends and family online shouldn't (and for the health of society, can't) be middlemanned by a few corrupt billionaires for the sake of profit.
I‘m not sure if it‘s only me — and this should be by no means coming across as trolling — but am I the only one who thinks that Mastodon already lost the race when it started, because of its very unappealing name? The name just sounds horrific to my ears, like something that needs to be avoided. Possibly because I‘m not a native English speaker.
Besides that, it also just felt too complicated for non techies to grasp the whole thing. Most people surely just want to download an app and start using it without thinking about servers and such.
Bluesky does both of those things better: it has a very attractive name and is dead simple to sign up, yet it still has all the advantages of a foundation which allows federation.
Unappealing name? Mastodon is one of the funniest words in the English language once you know its backstory.
Mastos + Odont
Mastos means breast, and Odont means tooth. Breast tooth. Why is it called that? Because some smart people a long time ago thought that the protrusions on mastodon teeth looked like little nipples. Seriously.
I used to work at a history museum where we would show people the differences between mastodon and mammoth teeth and without fail the nipple-tooth explanation would make people laugh every time.
...honestly I think Mastodon is an even worse name after learning the etymology.
To each their own, but I wholeheartedly disagree. If every company/website had a name with a ridiculous etymology, the internet would be a much more interesting place.
Regular people don't really care about word etymology. I agree with theavi, the word just isn't cool sounding. And the meaning people associate with it is something that went extinct, not something that's the future.
Still, even with a better name it would still have failed. For the same reason Voat failed, and Lemmy failed, and Bluesky is floundering already. If you want to launch a successful new social network, you need to offer something unique and new (for example like Snapchat and Tiktok did). Not just rely on protesters/boycotters.
Also, all that decentralization/federation is just confusing for regular people. Outside of hardcore geeks, nobody really wants it.
Is it? I agree it's no Twitter, but I'd consider it the most successful new social media. I've been consistently surprised how many friends randomly talk about BlueSky. Adding video support when the Brazilians joined felt like a turning point.
The decentralization/federation being confusing for newcomers is a very real issue and I can definitely see that hampering the adoption of these new platforms. But honestly, I think the word mastodon is pretty cool, regardless of the etymology, and this thread is the first time I have ever considered that other people might find it off-putting. I think the whole extinction connotation might be a bit overblown.
IMO, Bsky has been speedrunning Masto's decline into meta-discussion and hivemind circlejerking.
The problem with protestors and boycotters is that they're aren't advertizer-friendly. Worse, they're downright repellant to normies. It's most obvious with Voat and 8chan, but there's plenty of leftist purity-testing that kills migration momentum.
I don't think the issue is necessary (just) the audience, but I think you're getting at one of the root causes. I've mostly stuck to Mastodon and Lemmy recently and haven't used Bluesky. But, my impression is that because these are tools built buy the community for the community, the platforms themselves aren't advertiser-centric. Do they provide key analytics, have sales teams wooing advertisers, provide revenue splits, etc? Would Mastodon or Loops ever have it's own version of the TikTok shop?
When people say they want to be an "influencer," obviously they need an audience to influence. But, also importantly, they want to be able to make money doing it. Why would a wannabe influencer spend their time on a platform that can't easily be monetized, especially without having clear examples of others successfully making a living on that platform?
As a user, it's nice to not be inundated with ads, influencers, misinformation, etc. But, those things are the also some of the growth engines for other networks. [(Additionally, the person who's an annoyance to me on other networks is someone that tens or hundreds of thousands may show up to follow.)]
Lemmy & Masto still have plenty of that without the commercial influence, but I strongly agree with the rest of everything you just said.
I don't disagree, especially depending on the instance. My impression is that for established networks, it's on a different level. That may partially be because of the audience, but I wouldn't be shocked if the algorithms (which people can't always opt-out of) encourage these things.
Misinformation just feels like it belongs with the potential downstream effects of prioritizing for engagement/time spent on site over the quality of content or quality of the time spent on site.
Much like the app, it takes effort to appreciate.
Most don't want to have to learn Latin or paleontology to get a joke. Most don't want to have to take time and effort to figure out how mastodon works.
Fine for me, I don't need a ton of people on my social media ( hence why I'm here) but I'm wonder if it'll ever reach critical mass with its barriers to entry.
No. People thought that "tweet" was stupid when Twitter was new, and people got over it. It's just that Mastodon didn't have the marketing budget of a real company, and so it couldn't afford that "cool" or "hip" factor.
The name is a red herring. Mastodon would be in precisely the same spot it is today no matter what it was called.
No, you're right on the money. If anyone ever doubts the importance of good marketing and branding, I'll just point at Mastodon. Technically, a superior product to Bluesky, with actual implemented federation that works great. Very smart people. Said smart people were also not able to describe Mastodon to laypeople as "it's like email, you make one and then can talk to anyone with a Mastodon."
In one sentence you've just cleared up a lot of confusion for me about how exactly Mastodon servers worked with each other. Why have I never heard it described like that before‽
Because marketing requires some skills.
This is a problem with a great many open source type projects. The engineers are often brilliant and wonderfully-hearted, but they think like engineers at times they and their projects would be better served to think like communications students.
I don’t know how to solve the problem, but it’s a major barrier to widespread adoption.
I'd say Mastadon itself didn't do the best job describing their service, but they were a) caught off guard by the user influx, and b) were still developing. They weren't really in the place to suddenly throw their resources into marketing like crazy. The word Mastodon also isn't that gross of a word, though it happened to match the cumbersome nature of setting up an account. Within the general discussion of blame, Mastodon should not get a ton of points docked for being itself.
I do blame everyone that talked up a service when they couldn't descibe how or why they were using it. It reminded me of bitcoin in the early days and how I never once heard any description about wallets or how to use them when asking people or googling around back then. A lot of it just comes down to computer science people in general: they typically have a very hard time describing from the perspective of, or relating to, the common user about how to use a function in its basic form instead of its complicated building blocks. A lot of the time it comes from inexperience in tutoring-like environments, but it doesn't help that some people like to gatekeep knowledge to others as well. Regardless, if someone asks about an app with the full intent to switch out of spite for another platform, and you're unable to convince them in that state? You're unable to give some brief instructions that make someone in active 'i will put effort toward joining another platform' energy not follow through??? I get that not everyone has experience in advertising as well, but come on.
This turned into more of a rant, but I just wanted to voice that while Mastodon didn't play their hand right, the community around it did a great job playing their hand wrong.
Just like email
For me, the issue with the name Mastodon is it's an extinct creature. Not exactly the kind of thing that brings in crowds.
Yup. A classic case of idealist open software projects shooting themselves in the foot by not realizing that people make decisions emotionally. A lot of unpleasant things go through my head just reading the name but certainly reading a “primer” of how mastodon even fucking works, which is not how any other social media app ever worked in this millennium. And the techy idealists crowd (which I’d include myself as being a part of, to a large degree) largely ignored any issues with onboarding and confusion for potential users. Like, almost rolling their eyes at your aunt and uncle not being able to read a short readme.md and do a little research on potential instances. How deluded and out of touch is that? I was a little more open at first because it honestly would have been great if it succeeded, but who are we kidding? It has always been bonkers.
I really wanted a good reddit alternative to come out of the API protests, I was so pissed off when all the geek started pushing another one of those decentralized messes (Lemmy), it was so obvious it was going to fail.
I don't know why this keeps happening.
Decentralization seems like a way to have your cake and eat it too. People who are unhappy with Reddit ultimately are extremely different themselves. Some of them want WAY MORE moderation, some of them want WAY LESS moderation. That's not really reconcilable on a single platform.
That's the problem when you rely on protesters to build your social network in the first place. Most people are there just to complain about the website they left, and as you mentioned they can't even agree on what the new website should be like.
In the meantime, snapchat was like "hey, we'll make your posts temporary and give you cool filters", and everyone was like "fuck yeah!" Same goes for tiktok - nobody was catering to people who wanted shorts, especially after vine died. Add a really good algorithm, and you get something people actually want, not just a place where you go to protest a different website.
Bluesky is dead simple to onboard because it’s not federated/descentralized, no matter what they say. It’s so not descentralized that a group of experts is trying to raise USD 30 mi to turn it, which is bonkers considering we already have a descentralized social platform/protocol — ActivityPub.
This feels a bit like a "mountain comes to Mohammed" thing though - there's no point building the perfect decentralised protocol if it being decentralised makes it so difficult to use that people avoid it. If the goal here is to build something decentralised and popular, then starting where the people are and working from there seems like a pretty sensible approach.
I also think claims that ActivityPub is the only true decentralised protocol are kind of absurd, given the top-heavy nature of it. It is decentralised in the same way that email is, which is to say that it isn't - it is dominated by a smaller number of big servers, and if it becomes more mainstream, that effect will only get worse, in exactly the same way that most people use Google or Microsoft for email, and you have an inordinate number of hoops to jump through if you want to do your own thing.
The analogy with email's big servers isn't fair. You can spin up an ActivityPub server and immediately start talking to anyone; with email, this is way harder due to spam mitigations (DKIM, new domains policies, spam lists etc.)
I guess pretty much everyone did a terrible job in October 2022, when people were avid for a Twitter alternative and Mastodon was ready. By focusing on instances and decentralization, we gave Mastodon/decentralized social media a bad reputation. Nowadays, when someone shows interest in fediverse and asks for advice, all I say is “start an account on mastodon.social and be happy”. After testing the waters, they can learn the details and move on to another/smaller/own instance down the road.
In this path (“start an account on mastodon.social and be happy”), I can't tell in what sense Mastodon is more difficult to use than Bluesky.
About twenty or thirty years so you could do exactly the same with email. Then everyone got an email address, spam became the nightmare that it is today, and so major email providers started aggressively blocking (one might say defederating) bad servers, to the point where it became quite difficult to stay in the good books of those providers. That's all stuff that can happen in the Fediverse, and is very likely to happen if it becomes popular.
I think there's a certain extent to which perfect is the enemy of good, and there will surely never be a perfect distributed social media system because the two concepts are fundamentally at odds with each other. But then we end up in the same place we were before: ATProto and ActivityPub are both imperfect protocols, but one of them has lots of activity and buzz, and the other does not - Mohammed must go to the mountain and all that.
Of course this isn't the only consideration, and I also get the impression that ATProto is also a protocol designed with a certain amount of hindsight based on real experiences at Twitter and the strengths and weaknesses of ActivityPub. I'm not entirely sure on the details, but I get the impression that they've tried to make more operations push-based rather than pull-based, which allows more efficient communication between nodes. This comes at the cost of requiring more resources, which means it will be harder to run a node, but like I said before federated systems are always going to be largely centralised around a few main nodes, and I suspect it's better to optimise for federating between those larger nodes (and therefore removing the walled garden effect of something like Twitter or Facebook) rather than optimising for every individual being able to host their own system (which will never happen, see again email).
That is very funny to me because I live in an area where mastodon is part of the name of lots of businesses and little league team names and such. I thought the name was incredibly generic.
That’s an interesting take, and of course how the name sounds to different people is really subjective. Personally I like the name. I think elephants are cool and kinda goofy, and big badass prehistoric ones are even cooler. And I guess this terminology isn’t widely known but I love that Mastodon’s equivalent of “tweets” are called “toots.” That’s friggin’ adorable.
I don’t have a horse in this race. I didn’t use Twitter and I’m uninterested in anything like it. If I were to use one I’d gravitate toward the decentralized, FOSS, privacy-oriented one that isn’t run by elites and funded by venture capital.
The thing I know about Mastodon is it’s federated and I love the idea of that. But I’m also intimidated by it because it sounds complex. If I were to start using it, I’d need to develop a mental model of how it works and I (even as a career software engineer) don’t want to do that. I would be joining to chat with people, not to figure out how content is propagated and moderated across a distributed network. Those are implementation details an end user shouldn’t have to contend with— ESPECIALLY for mass adoption.
Anyway, I’ve heard that it’s not really that complicated to use, I dunno. That’s still the impression I have of it. I assume others who have considered it are in a similar boat. That seems like a bigger barrier to me than the branding… overcoming the (appearance of) complexity is a big and important challenge for building a userbase. And I kinda feel like Mastodon has missed its chance. In the early days of Musk-era X chaos, it was as likely a successor as anything else. But they squandered their opportunity and Bluesky snatched it away. I think it’s too late now for Mastodon to reach #1. That ship has sailed.
It's really not so complicated to onboard. If you download the app and sign up that way, it by default offers you @mastodon.social as a server. The rest of the sign up process is essentially identical to Bluesky or Twitter. The most frustrating part of it is wading through yet another list of people to follow, which is pretty much what's kept me from being engaged in the Twitter-like format in the first place.
I have to agree. It's obviously highly subjective, but I abhor "Mastodon" as a name. I'm not entirely sure why - it's a subconscious thing. If I have to put reasons to it, it's some combination of
It's too many syllables
The components syllables are harsh and "earthy". Compare the number of consonant endings in "Mastodon" and "bluesky".
The imagery of a "mastodon" conjures up something big and bloated. And dead.
Why do we want another social media? IMO it's for discovery.
Otherwise we could use Signal, email, Tildes, or any other communication platform. The advantage of Twitter over something like Discord is that you can discover new posts and people.
Personally, I think BlueSky's architecture and UX is better than Mastodon's. But I think the real goal should be to bridge these platforms (and others), then write shared code for, fund, and promote both of them. For example, a single open client that can create an account on BlueSky or Mastodon or sync one between both. Along with better algorithms and tools for discovery and moderation.
Also, my understanding is that coding a social media is the (relatively) easy part, the hard part is social. Good discovery, moderation, and funding are what make or break a site, and you accomplish these with people: interesting people who create "good vibes", level-headed moderators, and sponsors. The big social medias are entrenched, I don't even think because they have better discovery algorithms or UX, but because they have far more users and moderators. Arguments over what platform, what governance completely sidestep this, the main thing I think the $30 million should be for is to figure out how, and then do, 1) convince people to make interesting things the open web 2) while blocking grifters, trolls, etc.
Excellent point. I agree completely; this argument is fundamentally about choice. My grandma should be able to use Twitter. My weird uncle should be able to use X. My nephew should be able to use Bluesky. And I should be able to use Mastodon. But even more importantly, we should all be able to interact and follow and reply to each other through a common standard! Because they're all at the root level the same.damn.thing.
That's why I use Mastodon. That's why I refuse to use X or Bluesky. Cory Doctorow articulates this well in some recent posts: if the product is entirely controlled by one company, particularly the app experience in thr age of smartphones, you're being held hostage and so is your data. We need interoperable standards so that when Musk buys Twitter and starts pushing his own political agenda we can keep the same identity and follows and followers. That's what Mastodon is all about; the federation isn't the main appeal, it's an implementation detail of the fact that ActivityPub is a standard that gives users freedom to read and write and recommend content however they wish. Exactly like you can do in the real world with a book or an article.
Censorship and moderation is a distraction. If your community shards down to reasonable sizes and a manipulatable algorithm doesn't force-feed 'viral' content to the masses, local communities can self-moderate just fine. The problem comes from scale. Think of it this way: a small town doesn't need a standing police force that patrols the streets aggressively on your typical day. You just need s couple of officers around to respond to calls, anf maybe a tiny bit of proactive policing. But when a total solar eclipse happens and 100x the town's population in tourists shows up in a couple of hours, you damn well better have a bunch of cops to deal with the scaling factor of accidents, troublemakers, and confused tourists who mess up because they don't know the area.
Ghost is starting to take this to an even more interesting level this year, trying to create a one-stop ActivityPub hub in a single (potentially self-hosted) site. That'll let you consume blog posts, microblog posts, image posts, and more (RSS as well, perhaps?) all in a single feed that you run yourself.
RSS and Atom and XMPP and HTTP(S) are the fundamental building blocks of so much on the internet, including these hostage-taking ad-feeding radicalising Skinner boxes we call social media today. We really need a new standard to cover the higher level of abstraction built on top of the existing standards to implement social media. Because interacting with your friends and family online shouldn't (and for the health of society, can't) be middlemanned by a few corrupt billionaires for the sake of profit.