Platform shifts don’t happen overnight.

A year ago this time, Mastodon was a curiosity. Today, it feels like Twitter circa 2010. That's something.

Twitter 2010 was already a global party.

And so is Mastodon, now.

No it isn't. I know someone who runs a specialist news outlet and cross-posts everything to Mastodon. It yields only a trickle of traffic/engagement despite the target market being pretty anti-Musk. Indeed, I'm told traffic/engagement on Twitter has actually improved since the takeover. What people say and how they behave are two different things. A lot of people still check Twitter every day because train wrecks are interesting.

Every time someone shares a link to a Mastodon post, I click on it and eventually realize it's not my instance, so I can't just click to follow the person or return to my feed by clicking. And that is only one example of how the decentralized experience is fundamentally broken.

There also weren't any functional alternatives to Twitter at the time. The following+unthreaded discussion model has only been replicated by Mastodon, and Mastodon obviously has much stronger competition!

Yeah but it already failed... Popularity peaked and it's in a straight dive down.

You shouldn't be downvoted as you're factually right. MAU have been tanking since Dec 22. They lost almost 50% from the peak, and the line continues to go down, losing a few thousand active users every single day.

Which isn't a total failure, it can be a small self-sustaining network but it fails to have a broad appeal.

Twitter circa 2010 was gaining active users. Mastodon today is losing active users: https://mastodon-analytics.com/

Twitter isn't dead but it has competition now.

That competition feels/looks like early 00s blogging -- less mass, pre-eternal-September, Gibsonian ham-radio-postcards -- but then again that's what grew up into what we have now.

Did it grow into that with competitors that have money?

Mastodon will likely never get anyone but tech folks. And the era of tech folks being the trendsetter on the intarweb pipes is probably over.

Actually, yeah, it did have competitors with money. You ever wonder why IE and specifically IE 6 just got abandoned in stasis forever? Because like a number of other big incumbents circa early 00s, MS really thought the web was a fad. They envisioned an app ecosystem. Maybe XAML, maybe Java, maybe something else. But not these dumb little browsers.

IE 6 was abandoned because Microsoft won the browser war. It's ridiculous to say that in 2006/7 Microsoft thought web was a fad

> IE 6 was abandoned because Microsoft won the browser war.

This has never been adequate to explain how MS treated IE.

Microsoft also won the desktop decisively, arguably more decisively than the browser front. And yet far from abandoning windows, it pretty consistently iterated via major releases and service updates, even when competitors were almost rounding errors and when they had a business base that often valued backward compatibility as much or more than anything else.

Microsoft doesn't abandon things just because they achieved dominance.

IE was abandoned because MS of the early 00s still thought most computing would stay on the desktop, in network-aware applications, maybe even using different runtimes, but still desktop apps.

> It's ridiculous to say that in 2006/7 Microsoft thought web was a fad

It's ridiculous of you to choose 2006/2007 when you're responding to a comment that specifies "circa early 00s."

And yes, by 2006/2007, MS realized they'd made a mistake and the web was becoming something that could deliver experiences competitive with desktop apps.