Because you can go to Bluesky and click “Sign Up” without a confusing explanation about instances.

Mastodon has a big honkin' "Join mastodon.social" button both on joinmastodon.org and in the mobile apps to solve this exact problem.

But the fact they still have this perception of confusing sign-up means they were too late.

Good solution. Problem is they have chosen a 'default instance' in the app which goes against the idea to encourage federation of the platform and instead accelerates centralization and there was backlash over that change. [0]

mastodon.social will only get more centralized and is the only one that is benefitting from that change.

[0] https://mstdn.social/@feditips/110233282251253677

This. Nostr could learn from this too.

Mastodon is confusing for non-technical users, while Bluesky is pretty much a drop-in replacement for Twitter.

I consider myself a technical person, perhaps not social media savvy anymore, and Mastodon confused the hell out of me. I don't think it stands a chance with regular Joe.

And beyond that, the federated aspect makes it very different from a global site like twitter. It was aimed at having control but in doing so you feel disconnect IMHO.

This isn't the most important reason, but compared to similar web sites, Mastodon's user experience is awkward.

Its fundamental design lacks the ability to provide features that many people want, because the developers see those features as anti-features to be avoided.

Bluesky's AT Protocol was developed specifically to address what they saw as shortcomings with the ActivityPub protocol used by Mastodon and other similar services.

It's fundamentally reasonably capable of things like full text search and better discovery, which its lead dev and much of the community see as anti-features. There has been some recent progress on search, but being searchable is opt-in only because many users are opposed to search.

I think decisions like that are an active choice not to become popular.

My impression from conversations here is that the AT protocol largely came from the developers being unaware of how they could've achieved the same thing with no or minimal extensions to ActivityPub. There may or may not be actual benefits to the protocol, but they could have achieved a far smaller delta and largely kept interoperability without any major sacrifices.

Try using it, it has extra steps and decisions that add friction and are annoying / challenging for end-users.

It did see a big surge in popularity when Musk bought Twitter, but user numbers right now are not growing significantly.

They probably are, but they don’t have a marketing team like BlueSky does

Good question. When you say Mastodon, my answer is 'which one' or 'which instance'?

That basic hurdle is the reason why it is a barrier to many potential new users and it has traded complexity over ease of onboarding when trying to sign up new users (who are not techies or sys-admins).

One solution is to set a default instance. I.e 'mastodon.social' and tell users to sign up there. Again, that increases the issue of centralization. To prevent that, you close sign ups and tell users to sign up elsewhere. Then the issue continues on other instances.

Along side other issues, that is why new users just went to Bluesky or Threads instead.

> fully decentralized, no ads, no algo, no corporate control.

No one owns it so there’s no team of well paid professionals trying to make it grow.

It's a worse experience for posters for two major reasons: blocking is not as effective (blocked people can still read and respond), and there are too many weird scolds who yell at people for not adding content warnings for trivial things.

I don't post so it doesn't affect me directly. It affects where the people I follow choose to post.

It's not idiot-proof. Common-denominator platforms where you're expecting the general population need to be intuitive and work like people expect them to. Mastodon doesn't and their federated model is a pain in the behind.