Mastodon has been around since 2016 and has 804k MAU.
The platform has 57 third party apps.
The platform is decentralized and has community ran servers.
Mastodon has been around since 2016 and has 804k MAU.
The platform has 57 third party apps.
The platform is decentralized and has community ran servers.
it’s been better marketed, and people struggle with the concept of federation and picking a server. and I guess the invite-only, artificial exclusivity strat has actually paid off for them initially, unlike for Google+.
also, a matter of culture. I’ve seen many newcomers complain about how some long time users act as HOA, reminding everyone to act according to the long-standing rules. many people of colour have experience many forms of racist behaviour, too, which has driven some communities away.
oh, and the federation/defederation business sometimes gets way too messy, which [cynic mode on] makes it difficult for people who want their Personal Brand™ to gain as many followers as possible over the entire network.
This is a HUGE reason. I didn’t know when I first signed up for Lemmy that I was on what is essentially a tankie instance. I didn’t know when I signed up for Pixelfed that I wasn’t going to be able to see shit because the first server I signed up for wasn’t really federated with anyone and I’ve mostly given up on it. I still can’t see a bunch of stuff on Mastodon without switching through several accounts with no rhyme or reason.
I’ve said before that I obviously like it here because I’m using the services, but it’s not easy. Most people don’t know about the fediverse, and most of those that do want to be passive about maintaining their social media. Most of the fediverse is built for nerds.
Language filter in bluesky is much better than Mastodon as well
Mastodon relies on users setting the language their post is in manually, so if someone posts in two languages and forgets to switch between them, they don’t get filtered out. I know there are some other pieces of software that switch it automatically, I’m fairly sure Calckey automatically recognized the language you were writing in.
I already toggle the Mastodon settings to ensure that I got the feeds to the language I want (I want English only) and I still got feeds on different languages such as German and French
again, if the person who is making the post doesn’t change the setting, it won’t get filtered. if they type a message in German but the post’s language option is set to English (which I think is the default on some major instances), it won’t get filtered out.
you can usually check what their post’s setting is by starting writing a reply to them, as the language option of your post will switch to the one they post in.
That is why Mastodon is hard to get mainstream because not everyone wants extra effort to do this. Even, Twitter, threads and bluesky much better to filter their language content
I mute a few more non-English accounts each time I use Mastodon