HACKER Q&A
📣 andrewstuart

Has Mastodon blown its big chance?


Twitter users are talking about mastodon, asking questions, as far as I can tell in many cases giving up.

Do you think has blown its big chance?

If Mastodon is a fit to the job, it would have exploded with popularity.


  👤 PaulHoule Accepted Answer ✓
Mastodon can be successful for the people who use it even if it doesn't "make it big" enough to dethrone Twitter, Facebook, etc.

There are longstanding challenges to marketing something like Mastodon. Call it the "fediverse" or "PubSubHubBub" and I think people's eyes glaze over. But it doesn't have to appeal to everybody, and it might be better if it doesn't... Wouldn't it be great if we could undo the "Eternal September?"


👤 jstgord
Au contraire.. I think it has been maturing slowly, quietly..

and now there is enough churn/pain on Twitter to overcome the activation energy hump of moving to a new platform.

We need a social network to share short texts which cannot be easily turned off at the whim of a billionaire [or a government for that matter ] - Mastodon could be that thing, could grow into that thing, so is worth trying.

It also doesnt have to be perfect or complete to succeed - we can fix things and scale as we use it.

Our individual choices are a vote for the future we want - getting there is a noisy stochastic process.


👤 smoldesu
People said this the last 4-5 times Mastodon had it's "big chance" and the platform still seems to be doing fine. Methinks the people on Twitter complain too much, but with any luck Twitter won't even be a platform going into 2023.

👤 rektide
Excuse you? Rome wasnt built in a day, but you are "blowns it's big chance" posting after 1 week? And... it's numbers have "exploded".

I think it's far too many months early to tell.


👤 8bitsrule
For the people already using it regularly, it's doing something right.

It's a good thing it's not push-button easy, or the tsunami might have drowned it. Most of them would leave anyway ... not enough sugar rush.


👤 abirch
Most overnight success stories take years of work.