Social media needs to be very simple for the masses to adopt. The elevator pitch needs to be one sentence and must not include the word “server”.
Unless you're Discord, who got away with it by redefining "server" to mean something else.
I don't understand the knee-jerk reactions whenever Mastodon comes up here. Someone always has to declare it dead, someone always has to rant about "leftist politics" and "fascist moderators." And then they usually suggest Nostr which is far more dead than Mastodon.
Nothing is perfect - Mastodon does have its rough edges - but even a moderately successful breakaway from mainstream social media is worth celebrating. I remember when the consensus on HN was that any alternative to the mainstream would be impossible, doomed to fail. The fediverse has its community and its identity, it isn't a flash in the pan.
Yet in absolute numbers users are increasing. And Emacs activity is greater than it has ever been.
Yes. You don't need mass adoption to be wildly successful!
Yes.
Bear in mind many people here would consider geminispace to be a success and I seriously doubt that it even has 100k users.
"Success" has valid definitions beyond market capture and revenue. Mastodon is a success because it hosts a community and because it represents a validation of the model of decentralized federated social media.
And it isn't a zero-sum game, either. The entire point is that there doesn't have to be one "Twitter" one "Facebook" one "Youtube," or even one protocol to rule them all.
It's been around long enough that it has reached steady state. Existing (active) users are happy with its architecture, and are not concerned with discoverability, etc. Why would they leave?
