Starting to feel like this 2025 Influx of users is much larger than 2022 Influx of users. New users come in huge waves. Many of them also seem to genuinely like Mastodon according to the feedback. In 2022 many tried, soon gave up and left to Bluesky or back to X. Today, many have even deleted their commercial accounts and settled here.

I like this new development of things. Seeing new faces and more cat photos brings me so much joy. Thanks for being here. Remember that you matter.

#MastoAdmin #Mastodon #Fediverse #SocialMedia #SocialWeb #Meta

@rolle
And we users Thank You for this amazing instance where we can hang around.

@stedi 🙏

@OtterSide Perhaps. But in 2022 there were thousands of Finns and millions of users as well. I didn't see it as a ghost town even then as the same principles apply: You need to find folks and follow a lot. But probably just from my perspective it's been easier.

Anyway, the discoverability features (and features in general) are much better now when compared to 2022. It's very interesting and exciting thing to witness.

@rolle The push factors are much greater now. Twitter is dead, replaced by X. Facebook and Threads forgot that conversations are the raison d'être of social networks, so with ads coming to threads, people have a reason to leave, and Bluesky is VC funded, so likely to fall into the same trap as other "social media". I think a big step is Wordpress finally having two way traffic with the fediverse.

@jonathanirons That is not the truth though. You are following 49 people. Try following 7000 like me and I can prove you're wrong. It needs some work to make it vivid for you and I can assure you, some critical mass has been achieved already.

@arnodegroote Welcome! I have used almost every single social media platform there has been since 2002 (my count is a bit over 160 of them), got invited to Bluesky when they first launched it publicly invite-only. What I don't like is that it started as a "Twitter 2.0" project and is VC funded. I like the idea of their open protocol, but in my world they LARP decentralization. They could have built it on top of the same protocol than Mastodon or the Fediverse use, but decided to reinvent the cycle, most probably because of control and monetary gain. So I have a very contradicted opinion of it and I rarely use it.

Mastodon feels more natural and completely in my control. I have hosted my instance since November 2022 and it's been a blast. This feels genuine. No corporate is here to dictate what I can or cannot do.

@arnodegroote @rolle Read Cory Doctorow on enshittification of social media. Pretty much all the 'research' you need for your Bluesky question.

@rolle yeah it's gotten much more lively. Although I feel that people are interacting and responding less because there is so much more content. Mastodon has been a village where everybody knows everybody and not greeting someone who comments on your post would almost have been considered hostile.
Now it starts to develop the anonymity of a city. We'll see where that leads us, I wish I could keep the best of both worlds though.

@blauertee I don't feel that way. I get a lot of replies.

@rolle can I also say a big thank you to @FediTips who is always so helpful with waves of new people (including myself a couple of years ago)

@rolle absolutely. #Mastodon is much more fair. I'm telling everyone and managed (collectively) to get some photographers here just recently.

@rolle yeah sure you got over 6.000 followers.

@blauertee Exaxtly, so follow a lot and get more followers, then you get more replies, because your post shows up more. Simple.

@rolle Fediverse is for builders, makers and creators and for doing something PRODUCTIVE with social media. Bluesky is next in my social media kill list for social media, it's pretty useless noise in the end.

I'd figure that it is only question of time that someone will do Github equivalent based on Fediverse [1].

[1] One pretty interesting de-centralized Git experiment that I should give a shot some day created by @liw: https://radicle.xyz/

@jarkko @rolle To be clear: I didn't create #Radicle, I just contribute to it as my job.

@liw @rolle ah, thanks for the correction 🙂

@rolle @liw I already use korg instance often like gists as there is already syntax highlighting and change history.

@jonathanirons I didn't say you're doing it wrong Just pointed out something you said as truth. Perhaps I'm being too literal here, not my intention to be rude. Sorry.

@jarkko @rolle @liw Isn't what @forgejo is all about, a federated code collaboration platform?

Just saying that a Fediverse inspired GitHub seems to actually already exist. 🙂 Peace.

@rolle It certainly feels like a much most constant stream of new accounts or in some cases old accounts getting used for the first time in a couple of years. It's not quite the total and utter chaos 2022 was for me at least where we were seeing thousands of accounts per hour and unable to keep up with demand.

@rolle I agree. Last times I've seen quite a few posts about why mastodon bad but this time not a single one has not popped on my feed or that I've noticed it.

It's possible that my filters and my follows have changed over time to not see those but either way there has been a change.

@rolle I like to think of it as the beginning of the end of corporate-controlled social media.

@arnodegroote @martinvermeer @rolle A recent one from Doctorow (with more links) https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/

And on Bluesky from the technical side of things, by Christine Lemmer-Webber: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/

@jonathanirons Different things. If I say "the truth is banana is pink", you might as well prove me wrong it is in fact yellow. Then I can say I was mistaken - or stick to my belief and be offended. I didn't say anything about doing wrong things. Emphasis on the word "doing".

But perhaps we misunderstood each other. Just tried to state something you find as true that I do not agree with. I'm sorry. Have a nice day! 👍

@rolle @OtterSide the way I see it in 2022 it still felt like the thing people mostly talked about on mastodon was mastodon. Some of us understood that that was just a phase we had to go through, others found it off-putting. Now that we're past that it's easier for people to find others talking about whatever they're interested in, helped by the improved discoverability.

@plexus @OtterSide In my point of view the discussion has been very versatile. I agree there's a lot of discussion about Mastodon. But it is because Mastodon is bases on its users and admins. In other places the users can't be the developers of the service at the same time. In here each can contribute.

@rolle Yeah. I remember in 2022, after the Twitter acquisition, me and my colleagues joined Mastodon It seemed too quiet to us. Two years later I switched back and nowadays I admire this consciousness of content here and understand that you can step by step feel this silence with exactly what you want and what you need

@rolle I also feel like the Mastodon network is getting increasingly ready to welcome new people, and the retention rate is way higher than it was before. @renchap said it in recent (French) interviews : Mastodon wasn't exactly ready in 2022, a bit more in 2024, and now we all feel like it's getting real and ready for the long run!

@pedrosanta @rolle @liw @forgejo I don't follow actively what is going on in social media ;-) cool that something like is there already and somewhat obvious iteration...

@pedrosanta @forgejo @liw @rolle I'll check it out anyhow, thanks!

@rolle I think Mastodon has also had a lot time time mature since 2022, both technically and as a community. This is especially visible in Finnish Mastodon community (and I suspect in other smaller niches too).

@forgejo @liw @pedrosanta @rolle Definitely give it a shot. E.g. I use Codeberg already exactly because I knowingly don't want attention (public is fine but Git hosting does not need to be also a social media site in my case) :-) I use Github only for contributing some upstream projects that exist there...

@rolle People are starting to see the value of an independent network that's free from billionaires. The Twitter takeover might have seemed an isolated incident before, but now it's clear that billionaire owned social media can't be depended on.

@rolle

This is my mental model for social media:

1. X: digital town square (quantity)
2. Fediverse: digital Silicon Valley (quality)

Digital town square reminds of people overdosing booze or narcotics, buying sex from prostitutes or picking a fight so it is a clear looser in this comparison ;-) Not a goal I believe in tbh.

@rolle I am one of the 2025 newbies and still finding my feet, but appreciate the independent space and will absolutely stay put. Leaving the META verse behind and embracing the Fediverse 🙏

160 platforms! On 160 software bases, or are some of them same software, different management?

This sounds like it’s worth an analytical essay.

@rolle @arnodegroote

@clew @arnodegroote All different. I remember using a lot services like Bebo, Path, Livejournal, GetGlue and Delicious.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_networking_services

@arabiccola @jarkko @rolle @forgejo @pedrosanta Codeberg used to use Gitea, but they forked it to become Forgejo and that's what they're running now.

@liw @arabiccola @rolle @forgejo @pedrosanta aah, so I'm using Forgejo w/o knowing it o_O Cool. I love Codeberg. It's where I keep all my sandboxes :-)