Mastodon did not, and does not, have a unique selling point for most users

The ability to follow and interact with content creators and users on a wide variety of platforms all from one account on one platform is something I can’t do on corporate social media. On Mastodon, I pull in dank photography from PixelFed, tech threads from Lemmy, text posts from Mastodon/Calckey/Akkoma, and video content from PeerTube. Contrasted with having to manage separate accounts and feeds for YouTube/Reddit/Twitter/Instagram, it’s way more convenient once you’re past the initial hump of setting up your feed (which does need UI/UX improvements).

Decentralization is not a selling point for 99% of people

I mean, true. I’ve never heard any non-tech person be super hype about how email is decentralized and that they can host their own email server. They mostly just like that they don’t have to produce a physical letter, mail it, then wait for it to be delivered. They should care that some rich prick can just buy their social media site of choice and run it straight into the ground, but convenience and functionality matter more to them.

Most people don’t give a thruppenny fuck about their freedom to view and edit the source code of the software they use, which they would not know how to do even if they cared

They should, considering that even if they can’t do it personally, this means that other people who can have the ability to add any desired functionality and ship it out for them to use.

Most people are not ideologically opposed to the notion of proprietary software and cannot be convinced to be because it is simply not important to them and cannot be explained in terms that are important to them

They should, since companies are routinely putting them through the ringer and have no incentives to stop otherwise.

When given the choice between a tool that is immediately useful for achieving some sort of goal but conflicts with some kind of ideological standpoint and a tool that is not as useful but they agree with ideologically, they will probably choose the former

Only an issue when FOSS alternatives don’t achieve feature-parity, so we should make sure that our stuff is on point.

Decentralization makes the user experience worse

Eh, not really. The bigger issue is that the Fediverse platforms copied the design of centralized platforms for the most part without adequately adjusting for the different UX that a decentralized federated system provides. Some things I think should be standard that currently aren’t:

1. I want to be able to send search queries to other instances from my instance and have the results displayed back to me.
2. I want to be able to browse the timelines of other instances from mine.
3. PeerTube has a “remote subscribe” option where you fill in a little box with your @username@domain and it’ll open a window on your instance where you can follow the channel; I think this should be polished and then it’d be great.
4. Every platform should support hashtags and instances should be aware of each other’s hashtag usage so the search can be smart and recommend sending queries to instances where the hashtag you’re looking up is most commonly used.

I don’t think this is a fundamental problem with decentralization, but rather the implementation just needs some work. I think the above 4 tweaks would fix a lot of issues.

As a brief explainer (without wanting to turn this into yet another technical explanation of the fediverse), if you start up a fresh new Mastodon instance, it will see no posts. Its “federated feed” will be blank, the search will not find anything, searches for hashtags will show nothing, and it will ingest no posts from other servers. For the instance to start seeing posts, you must follow people.

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Either way, an instance will then only see the new posts of people who someone on the instance is following. This means that the more people on the server, with the more diverse follow lists, the better things work; the more hashtags will get useful results, the more the federated feed becomes useful as a means of discovery. Conversely, if you are the only user—of one of only a few users—on your instance, your federated feed will just be basically your follow list, so your means of discovery is limited to things your followers boost.

This means that for new users to Mastodon, objectively the best experience is delivered by joining a big instance, e.g., Mastodon.social. .social’s large user base means that its users follow more accounts on more instances than any other, which means it sees more posts than any other, which means new users have a rich source of other users and posts to find and follow, and thus infinitely better discovery options.

However, new users are also encouraged to join small instances and often explicitly not to join Mastodon.social, typically in service of avoiding centralization and pursuing a properly decentralized fediverse. Sometimes this works, in that the user joins a smaller instance that is still reasonably active and has enough active users following enough active users. Often it doesn’t. Often users get frustrated and leave because they’re not seeing any posts that they’ve not seen before, but if they were on .social or another massive server, they’d be seeing all sorts of content and have a reason to stick around.

This is actually a solved issue via relays. Small instances should set up a few to get a content stream going.

The people who accept these trade-offs are not normal, and they’re in charge

Hey, when you give users control of their own destiny and the freedom to mold it how they want, it’ll reflect their priorities. The Fediverse is no exception.

Mastodon doesn’t scale well, and its user base accepts no funding model other than charity

By design. We’re here because we’re fleeing monolithic sites with so much traffic that content moderation is a nightmare and that funding models basically guarantee enshittification. If you don’t like that, then the Fediverse isn’t for you.

But the reality is that all blocking Threads will do is cut the fediverse off from its most significant expansion possible.

Yeah, gonna be honest, not really interested in appealing to Meta chuds for growth at all costs.

In no small part, Mastodon’s culture is exclusionary

All of the above is tolerable if you want to keep Mastodon/fedi as a niche interest platform for people with niche interests, run for fun and/or based on the goodness of peoples’ hearts. Or if, conversely, you want to make the learning curve deliberately hard and the UX deliberately obtuse so that only the people willing to put up with all manner of bullshit bother to stick around (what I’d like to call the “Arch Linux approach to community building”). It is, however, completely incompatible with mainstream adoption.

True, but also not a bad thing. Not everything needs to be for everyone. The Fediverse can be for people who are tired of corporate control over their internet socializing and the people who don’t give a shit can just stay on Twitter while Melonbawler makes it easier for chuds to recruit and whatnot.

As for whether or not the migration panned out, well, Twitter isn’t dead, but Mastodon and the Fediverse still have millions more users than it did prior to the migration and the MAU count has stabilized 8 months later, so I’d still call that a dub.