Weren’t you complaining about mastodon having “no users” in the last big discussion about it here? Do you have some kind of personal issue with the protocol?

There are plenty of people using it. It has not “failed”.

> Weren’t you complaining about mastodon having “no users” in the last big discussion about it here?

Yes, I said: 'Little to no users'. After looking at it for a couple of years, it is not the typical twitter user that is self hosting their own Mastodon instance and just the same tech-folks that are doing that (unreliably) and sitting on Mastodon. The level of social interaction on Mastodon is so low and limited, that they still use their Twitter accounts more than their Mastodon accounts.

So yes, it is not early days anymore and we have given it enough time and it has already failed.

I'm following so many accounts that if I don't sign in for three or four days I can barely keep up with my home feed. Almost all of it is interesting, funny, insightful or simply chill discussion. They almost exclusively use the Fediverse, none of them use the Fedi as a second-class citizen. Your insistence that something that is alive, growing and healthy has "failed" is simply proof that you have failed to bother with it because of your preconceptions.

Exactly. I use mastodon daily, I follow tons of people that do as well. Mastodon doesnt need to be massive or fulfill whatever growth expectations armchair tech entrepeneurs expect of social media platforms here. It just has to be reasonably easy to maintain and actually play an important role in people's lives and it is absolutely doing that.

> Your insistence that something that is alive, growing and healthy has "failed" is simply proof that you have failed to bother with it because of your preconceptions.

Having 90% of registered accounts inactive with only 10% of them actively using the platform isn't exactly 'alive', 'growing' and 'healthy' especially when they occasionally run back to Twitter since they know little social engagement goes on Mastodon. 10 is closer to 0, than 90; Hence "Little to no one".

But we both know it is not just that. Not only they can't help using Twitter more, they won't move to Mastodon for the exact same reasons as I said and Twitter's network effect, hence why little to no-one is using Mastodon. The same tech-folks like (Mastodon.technology) are the ones 'self-hosting' these instances and not the regular users, since they don't care enough to even use it.

Not even the one operating Mastodon.technology could handle it. Might as well recentralize back to Mastodon.social just to save itself from the very low levels of social interaction since Mastodon has already repeated the same problems as GNU Social once again.

> Having 90% of registered accounts inactive with only 10% of them actively using the platform isn't exactly 'alive', 'growing' and 'healthy'

That's not at all true. Account activity follows the Pareto principle. It's not at all unusual for any online service to have a large number of inactive users. Perhaps it's different for Twitter, but considering I've probably signed up for it three times and use it approximately never, I'm skeptical.

What exactly has Mastadon failed to do?

This user's been on HN for a while repeating this ad nauseam.

https://www.google.com/search?q=rvz+mastodon+failure+site:ht...

I wouldn't engage.

> This user's been on HN for a while repeating this ad nauseam.

Repeating what? The truth?

Right, Please don't engage because everyone here knows it is true.

Six years of steady growth is a Silicon Valley failure. It is not a failure by any reasonable measure. I predicted back in the early days that Mastodon would grow slowly and organically as more people figured it out and helped people in their circles come over. It's slow and steady, but I was right. This is how things grew before anything less than a double-digit billion sale to one of the big tech companies was seen as a failure.

I look at all of the interests and discussions and shitposts that are on my home and local feeds, watch the interactions between mutuals and people argue, learn, laugh and join in shared hobbies and simply cannot fathom how this can be "failed". All this and if I turned off my anti-virus I wouldn't see any adverts and am never subjected to abusive interests or dark patterns. How is this failure? It's what I want from the Internet. It's real, actual people.