I don't understand why anyone would want to make the same mistake all over again: jumping onto a private platform owned by a company inevitably results in you becoming the product sold and enshittification.
No, not necessarily. Mastodon is actually "social media", as opposed to twitter/X, bluewhatever, facebook, or any other commercial outlet, to be honest, all of these have become "feeds" of promoted content designed to maximize "engagement".
Mastodon is social: you follow people, you see their stuff. It's what social media used to be.
And what is that experience of yours? Do you have experience from deployments with many independent atproto data servers and relays federating together?
Or do you have experience from bluesky, meaning you're only interacting with one central server and none of the complexities of federation come into play?
That’s like saying that someone using Google Reader doesn’t “experience federation of RSS”.
Yes, my experience using the Bluesky app includes the Bluesky app server aggregating from many independent PDS hosts (because people I follow like that). But it doesn’t show up in user experience because that’s the whole point.
And yes, I can use another aggregator instead of the Bluesky app, or even use a client which has no backend and relies on community-run Constellation index. It all roughly works the same.
If you use bsky.app, you still see posts from other servers (Blacksky, Eurosky, W Social, and so on). But yes, by the protocol's design you're primarily interacting with one central aggregator of everything (Bluesky's AppView).
Nobody important or worth following uses Mastodon.
Also Mastodon is on the road to enshittification since the previous CEO and founder bowed out for $1M using donations and the main instance federates with Meta's Threads.
The other instances are out of the question since one rogue instance owner can lock and shutdown that instance.
Huh, okay. For me there's everything from government updates to industry news to friends and acquaintances active on Mastodon. Meeting new people there as well. Maybe infosec and my friends are just all dorks
With this logic, Threads is the biggest 'Mastodon instance' with 500M active users monthly.
Why aren't the general public using the original first 'instance' which is Mastodon if it is just another node?
> Mastodon is independant, each instance manages itself, some are bad, some are good, you can even host your own, that's the power of decentralization.
I think this is where it falls apart.
Nobody wants to waste their time host your own, moving from a rouge instance, trying to search for users to follow and the worst one:
Choosing which instance to sign up to.
It is no wonder that even Bluesky is more active than Mastodon.
If I was going to tell someone what social media to sign up to other than X, it has to be either Threads or Bluesky.
Terry Tao, Bert Hubert, Michal Zalewski (lcamtuf), Bunny Huang are just a few in my feed. But Mastodon is more about peer-to-peer communication than celebrities farming engagement indeed.
No signs of enshittification either so far, barely any new features being added TBH
Another social network with 0 network effect and is dead on arrival. Now being closed makes it far worse than Bluesky and no better than a prototype pre-production version of Threads; with 0 users.
Also, for all their talk about human verification, I have 6 accounts under different names :)