[lambdadmitry]

There are at least three distinct use cases that Twitter somewhat covers:

a) participating in already existing, well-defined communities. Mastodon works for that, but so does Discord, Gemini, Gopher, tilda communities, IRC servers, and so on. Mastodon's peculiarities like tiny scale instances, inter-instance admin wars, non-existent search are perfectly fine for this use case. That's what it is made for, effectively.

b) connecting with friends and following their interests. This is just miserable with Mastodon: you might be on different instances that mute/ban each other, you might not find each other if you don't know their instances, if instances are interest-specific you have to follow on a number of instances, if their instance admin gets fed up with it and shuts it down you need to reconnect somehow, etc. Mastodon is not an identity-first design, it's community-first, and it's a problem for this use case.

c) following celebrities or creators famous in the world of atoms. Celebrities would want massive following, which requires massive scale, which is hard to achieve for something effectively run by volunteers. If it's smaller scale celebrities, they'd also want discoverability, which is hampered by the lack of search, federation bans, etc.

Mastodon is widely presented as a "twitter backup/alternative". It's just misleading unless the person moving to it only wants (a). There is nothing wrong with wanting (a)! However, it means that Mastodon has very little similarity to Twitter if people want (b) or (c).

[detaro]

Based on my experience I feel like you massively overstate the issues with b).

> you might be on different instances that mute/ban each other,

only an issue if it's actually bans (mutes dont affect following), and if you don't explicitly pick a very ideological instance (either towards banning a lot or towards tolerating behavior that gets you banned a lot) that's not really a problem. I don't believe I've ever encountered a "I want to follow this person but can't", even when e.g. looking through a few hundred accounts I got from my twitter followings.

> you might not find each other if you don't know their instances,

To follow people you need to know their username, yes (which happens to include the instance). Is there anything where that isn't the case? I certainly wouldn't reliably find my friends on Twitter either without knowing that.

> if instances are interest-specific you have to follow on a number of instances,

Very few instances are that strictly interest-specific that they force people to take other interests elsewhere. And if someone does run multiple accounts and wants people to follow multiple, they link them so its just a few extra clicks once, hardly a big hurdle in the few cases where it does happen.

> if their instance admin gets fed up with it and shuts it down you need to reconnect somehow

True if the instance just disappears without warning, otherwise the account move feature handles this transparently.

[cykros]

I absolutely find at least the verified crowd on Twitter without knowing their usernames. Usernames, display names, and real names (if provided) should all be a viable way to find someone -- not sure this isn't the case already, but if it isn't, it's something to consider as a much needed feature if Twitter's functionality is being emulated. Relying on knowing a username already means you basically need a separate identity layer to fall back to with reference to the Mastodon account.

[detaro]

Most people don't really have much of the verified crowd as friends, so being able to find them doesn't really matter for this case?

[cykros]

Very good points. The similarities seem mostly to begin and end with "short form blogging". Livejournal and Tumblr had (much) more in common than Mastodon and Twitter. Even AIM vs IRC had more similarities (In case it's not clear, I'm not a zoomer).

They're both fine for what they are...but one doesn't replace the other.

[joecot]

a) When you're using Discord, IRC, or a forum, all the conversations happen in separate gardens, and you have to jump between them. Mastodon lets you look into each of those gardens, see who you like, follow them, and talk to them, all in one place. There are some great communities, but you don't have to pick one of them. You use them as starting points to make your follow list. And it's not just Mastodon, it's also the Fediverse, which has Diaspora (like Facebook), Lemmy (like reddit), personal blog software, spinoffs of Mastodon and the others, etc. And you can connect to all of them. So it's like if Discord, IRC, and whatever else also worked together.

b) If their your friend, you know their user@domain, because they tell you, same as they would their email address. Unless you're on an Antifa instance and your friend is on a Nazi instance, it is highly unlikely they will be disconnected from each other. If you join one of the instances on joinmastodon.org they have agreed to give 3 months notice for any shutdown. You can move to a different instance at any time, export your follow list and redirect to the new instance.

c) They're already joining and there's a list on fedified.com . Of your use cases, this is IMO the least important. Most of the celebrities will join Bluesky and that's fine. But not only does Mastodon allow you to verify using your personal website, fedified gives a list of important verified accounts, and a number of organization specific Mastodon instances have started up for people in those organizations.

Mastodon is not Twitter, it isn't supposed to be. But if the point is to have social media with interesting conversations with friends and people you'd like to discover, it does that. And it can't be destroyed by a single billionaire. If the point is an algorithm that makes you sad and sells you things, and brands that want to grow followings to sell things, either hope Twitter recovers or Bluesky works.

[mlindner]

I agree. I mostly use it for [c] for following a variety of notable (at a small scale) artists and some online personalities as well as Elon Musk. None of them are on Mastodon.

I also use it for open source intelligence following (in English) for the Ukraine war and following space news people. Most of them are not on Mastodon (in both cases) are not on twitter.

Also this is regional and dedicated to English. In Japan the alternative being pushed by a lot of Japanese twitter users is Instagram. I've not seen one Japanese post talk about Mastodon. I don't think people really realize how popular Twitter is in Japan. It's basically the de-facto most popular social media service there.