Pretty interesting opinion piece on some of the UX hurdles open source and federated software faces.

  • LollerCorleone@kbin.social
    24·
    1 year ago

    When the Twitter migration happened, a lot of folks got overenthusiastic about the idea of the fediverse and started setting up their own Mastodon instances, despite having little to no experience with selfhosting before.

    A lot of such instances have since shut down as they realised the amount of efforts that actually needs into hosting such a platform, especially instances with open registrations. However, a large number of them did survive and are now thriving.

    Has the growth rate slowed? Sure, just like it is expected happen after a sudden influx. But it is false to say that Mastodon growth has stalled. Instead, the phrase I would use is ‘stabilized’. Mastodon growth has stabilized into a healthy level as user growth is now happening more organically. Some stats below:

    12,808,214 accounts +217,864 in the last week

    Stats on most active instances:

    By number of users:
    https://i.postimg.cc/fb6FyY89/Screenshot-20230625-121432-Firefox.jpg

    By number of posts:
    https://i.postimg.cc/cCWbM0y1/Screenshot-20230625-121509-Firefox.jpg

    How can anyone look at these numbers and say that the growth has stalled?

    • camelbeard@kbin.social
      10·
      1 year ago

      I have been working in software development for 2 decades. I’m saying that to make the point that I’m in the more technical group of internet users.

      Anyway even I just jumped ship from Twitter to mastodont without really understanding how it worked.

      So I’m pretty sure lots of users just signed up with the first server they found and slowly realized it wasn’t just a Twitter clone.

      Now that I do understand it I really love the concept, but it’s definitely different than just Twitter.

      For example I use two accounts on different servers with very different content. Personally I really like that separation.