In the wake of the US election result there has been another wave of people leaving Twitter. Unlike in 2022, however, hardly any of these people are ending up on Mastodon. Instead, BlueSky is winning all the attention. So once again Mastodon users are wailing and rending their garments, saying that Mastodon has failed.
Look, there are good reasons to hate what Mastodon is today. But the death of Mastodon has been proclaimed many times over the years. The case this time is less convincing than ever.
The reason people are dancing on Mastodon’s grave is that people are not “signing up”. This is partly because signing up to Mastodon is so difficult. Why is it difficult? You have to pick a server. You need to follow people or else it seems “empty”. A lot of servers have bad moderation.
News flash: these things are not gonna stop people signing up for a single heartbeat. People will chew through concrete to reach the rest of their people. They’re not gonna be slowed down because “it seems empty”. The reason people are not signing up to Mastodon is that their people aren’t on Mastodon. That’s the entire story. If their people were on Mastodon, those people would be helping them through the process. You don’t have to choose a server: choose mine. If you’re getting harrassed you’ll tell me, and I’ll tell you how to block and report. I’ll be holding your hand the whole way, and the process will be great. But if I’m not your people, you won’t bother with any of that. You’ll go to where your people are.
So the story is that people are signing up to BlueSky instead, because their people are there. But are they, really? BlueSky is still a fraction of the size of Twitter. Whoever you are, moving from Twitter to BlueSky still means discarding your entire network, which means your support structure. You may be meeting new friends on BlueSky, but you’re starting from scratch. Moving to BlueSky is unavoidably a terrible experience, and people would only consider that if they’re having an even worse experience on Twitter. Gaining these users is no sign that you’re doing a terrific job. Malaysia and Turkey receive far more refugees than Germany or Japan, but that is not because they are better places to live.
A far healthier solution to the problems on Twitter would involve the vast majority of people staying where they are, keeping their communities together. But if some people feel the need to switch platforms, they should remain connected to their communities. That’s the promise of ActivityPub. It was never about starting from a blank page and building a whole new society. It makes more sense as a way to build new connections in the existing landscape.
User numbers are important. There’s no point building something if it’s not used. But user numbers are a secondary, lagging indicator. The Fediverse is missing its potential if most users have to “sign up”. These migrants are a reassuring vote of confidence, but they will never form the bulk of the population. Instead, the network should grow by connecting existing communities. Then, one by one, as people click the “share to Fediverse” button, the new networks will drive growth in the user numbers.
This process has been painfully slow over the last couple of years. WordPress was the first big network to gain this ability. But so far there’s only been a trickle of sites enabling the plugin, and in the meantime WordPress has been overshadowed by Matt Mullenweg publicly picking internecine fights. Threads is the other big name, but integration has also been slow, and is still not at a useful level of functionality. Nevertheless, these platforms are large and in no danger of fading into irrelevance any time soon. Automattic could go under but the WordPress software itself has a life far beyond one company. And Threads is extremely well-funded. There is plenty of time for the idea of sharing to the Fediverse to catch on within these networks. Honourable mention also should go to Discourse, a popular forum platform, which now has a Fediverse plugin.
But I would like to highlight the other end of the spectrum. ManyFold is a project to build a repository of models for 3d printers. It’s a community, but social networking is not the core mission. Despite that, sharing to Fediverse is built in. This is niche, it will never be a significant source of new users. But projects like this are how ActivityPub can wind up being part of the essential fabric of the Internet, the way email is. BlueSky could disappear tomorrow and who would be affected? The only people using it today are people who chose to leave Twitter. They could straightforwardly go back, after all. The same applies to Mastodon for that matter. But if ActivityPub is a spider’s web of independent implementations, all relying on that infrastructure for different essential purposes, then it becomes far more important. And at the same time, it becomes harder to imagine any scenario where it “goes away”.
As such, the Fediverse “wins” every time a new implementation arrives. That’s what keeps it vibrant and relevant. And the Fediverse has been scoring big wins recently. BlueSky “wins” every time it adds a million users. That’s what raises the odds of them paying back their VC capital, and the VC capital is what keeps BlueSky vibrant and relevant. To achieve that, BlueSky concentrates on the user experience, and they are far in advance of Mastodon. The Fediverse has not scored any “wins” at all by BlueSky’s standards. But the Fediverse needs to be appealing to developers more than to users. And BlueSky has really struggled to capture the attention of developers the way the Fediverse has.
The Fediverse as it exists today obviously has many problems. Indeed, arguably it is unfit for purpose. Its tendency to encourage racism, while gaslighting the victims, is appalling. This is partly driven by some of the technical flaws: a lack of mature moderation tools, together with inconsistent and inefficient distribution. Mostly it’s because Mastodon users tend to be pretty regrettable people, with all the biases and unearned privilege characteristic of the worst wing of the IT industry. And that’s what you’d expect if developers are the primary audience.
Obviously this cannot be changed by persuading the existing users to be less awful. If Mastodon was like BlueSky, it could only be solved by banning many of the existing users and encouraging a more diverse group of users to sign up. That’s what Twitter tried to do, back when it was being run by Jack Dorsey. But it’s extremely hard to fight your way out of the feedback loop, where new users are strongly disinclined to join a network with a bad reputation. Eventually you have no choice but to give up and let the bad actors take over. Which is what happened to Twitter. I can’t see Mastodon doing any better. But there’s a much better option for the Fediverse, which is not available to BlueSky: allow other communities to develop independently, naturally, and be open to them connecting if they’re interested.
Overall, I must admit I’m disappointed with the last two years on the Fediverse. I expect the number of users to go down as well as up, so from that perspective things have been fine. But I also did expect a doubling or two over that period. In fact things are stagnant. Really the biggest disappointment is that Twitter is in no danger of collapse at all. In fact, with the return of Trump to the Presidency, advertisers are gradually returning as a way to curry favour with the incoming regime.
Nevertheless. The Fediverse is in no danger of losing users. It is remaining firmly entrenched, and development continues. There are also multiple serious pathways to long-term growth. I’ve been on the Fediverse for more than a decade, and for most of that time I felt compelled to supplement it with a “proper” social network. But I can’t imagine myself needing to sign up to BlueSky any time in the next decade.