Matt Birchler (via Michael Tsai):
Forget everything about how other social networks are bad, what makes it so that almost everyone who joins Mastodon gives up on it? I don’t have easy answers (although I have some ideas, maybe for another post), I mostly wanted to write this to get my fellow Mastodon users thinking. Are we happy being an ever-shrinking niche social network? If we are, then how can we be mad at everyone who chooses to use something else? If we aren’t, then how can we make this place something more people want to spend time on?
Like Birchler, I like Mastodon and just resolved to spend more time there.
But content is king. Mastodon caters to a handful of niches. It’s not a place to go for sports, pop culture, or politics beyond a narrow subset. Part of that is inherent to the setup of a federated social network, but even Bluesky, whose interface and sign-up flow is considerably nicer than Mastodon’s, feels constrained in the kinds of posts that show up there. X (and to a lesser extent Threads) can leverage their existing audiences to supply content in ways that Mastodon cannot.
I don’t have the answers, but I really like the idea of building small but enduring internet communities outside the domain of tech giants, which are hollowing out the broader internet as we know it. So I’m just going to keep posting/reacting/commenting and hoping the connections follow.