In the past two weeks, the Mastodon-compatible parts of the Fediverse have gone from 600K active users to 7M active users. George Takei and Elvira are on Mastodon. We'll see how things develop, but this doesn't feel niche anymore.

How did the compute power increase 15x ? Last I tried to join a server, they were full.

The number of active servers increased by 300 in the same timespan, so the influx was spread out a bit. The strain on the bigger servers has been a little rough, but it should level out.

Your numbers are a bit off. It's 7m total up from ~5.6m before all this, not active. The active count historically drops back down to ~100k after booms, but this one does seem different and sustained due to the different circumstances. It's usually a small burp in a specific community. It's never been all of Twitter's most active users from across all communities considering alternatives.

It's one thing to get users. It's another to keep them. Mastodon's user experience is godawful. It might be an IRC replacement for nerds, but it'll never be Twitter.

I've found Mastodon's UI to be so vastly superior to Twitter that it isn't even funny. Volunteers are running circles around Twitter's UI team.

I’m willing to bet a pretty penny that the next big social media will be built on the fediverse.

> Glad Mastadon is doing its thing being like the IRC of twitter or whatever, but there's absolutely no way it ever truly competes

A good thing about open source software is that any kinks can be fleshed out over time through contributions and forks.

Think about how many non-technical people run WordPress blogs on the internet.

Do you have any actual facts to back this up? I would be interested to know why you are so sure of this.

The Mastadon hype here has serious "year of the Linux desktop" vibes -- technical people getting excited about features that don't matter at all to the average user.

Until journalists, politicians, musicians, artists, and brands can have their posts go viral into the feeds of tens of millions of (unwilling) users, it doesn't replace what makes Twitter valuable.

Twitter became Twitter by branding functionality that everyone with an email address already had access to, and slapping a simpler interface on it. Could that be replicated? The historical success of innumerable chat startups suggest it could be.

The successor to Twitter has an advantage that Twitter didn't have, which is an existing social graph ready to migrate. If a critical mass of the Twitter graph moves to Mastodon, and the interface and experience can be made as simple as Twitter, it has a chance.

> have their posts go viral into the feeds of tens of millions of (unwilling) users, it doesn't replace what makes Twitter valuable.

Excluding or severely limiting virality is the essential criterion for any Twitter replacement.

That said, though I like and use Mastodon (as I do Linux), it is just not going to get Twitter-scale mass adoption. It is not, and believing to the contrary is just obvious delusion.

Maybe post.news will. It's worth a try. But if it doesn't attenuate virality, it won't improve on Twitter enough to be worth the trouble.