As Mastodon is experiencing a sudden rise in its popularity. Its creator organizes an AMA on Reddit to answer commonly asked questions.
Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter, Mastodon is a decentralized and open-source social media platform that has increased its number of users between 300K and 2.5M daily active users.
Eugen Rochko, the founder of Mastodon, announced the milestone in a blog article last week. Describing Mastodon as a “radically different option:
“While new and old social platforms are abundant, Mastodon is a completely different social media approach that provides something traditional social media can’t. This could be one of the primary reasons Mastodon has been gaining popularity, soaring from. 300K active users per month to 2.5M in October and November with an increasing number of politicians, journalists, actors, writers, and other organizations transferring over.”
The new ownership of Twitter is causing tension among users, leading many to search for an alternative.
Mastodon’s free and open-source software permits anyone to manage the social media platform they want on their infrastructure while also being connected to an international and decentralized social network.
The rapid growth of Mastodon, launched publicly in 2016, has raised concerns and questions from new users.
Rochko recently hosted an AMA on Reddit to address these questions, and answered many frequently asked questions.
I dug through the thread to pick out the top highlights, which included many questions I’ve seen from marketers.
The Twitter Situation
The question: “When you first decided to develop Mastodon, did you expect a situation like the one that came to pass with Twitter to happen?”
Rochko admitted to being doubtful of Twitter’s leadership but had no idea of this type of situation.
Some of my primary motives for exploring federated social media (back before GNU social) before deciding to create my version of it through Mastodon were doubts about Twitter’s future and leadership, and, in a sense, yes. But I’m not going to pretend that I was aware of what could come of my idea at the time.”
Mastodon As A Twitter Alternative
The question: “Do you think mastodon will become greater than other twitter alternatives like truth social?”
Rochko affirms:
“If it is not already, which I am almost sure it is and has always been, yes.”
Algorithms
Questions: “What are your opinions about “algorithms”? Do we expect to see more of these simple, transparent algorithms for sorting posts, such as for a different sorting method for /public/local/public, /public and the home page?”
Rock says he does not have strong feelings about algorithms and carries out to maintaining a reverse-chronological feed:
“I believe that algorithms with personalization, such as YouTube’s or TikTok’s recommendations, should be handled with attention because they could reinforce your prejudices and take you down conspiracy rabbit tunnels. I have steered clear of anything AI-related in Mastodon. But I do not have powerful feelings about “algorithms” in mainstream, only that the home feed should be reverse chronological and only contain content you decided to put there.”
Explore Page
Questions: “Are there plans to allow “how many times an item has been favored in the past’ to be used as a selection criterion? If not, what was it decided not to utilize this?”
Rochko claims that the Explore site is created to achieve this automatically.
“Trending posts on the explore-page are ranked by their re-blogs and favorites count with a decay from when the post was published (similar to Reddit and HN).”
Sign-Up Process
Answer: “The sign-up procedure on Android is somewhat outdated. How can you improve it to make it more accessible to those who aren’t as tech-savvy?”
Rochko claims that Mastodon is re-designing the process of onboarding for Android:
“Our most recent beta build for Android features a revamped onboarding process. The most noteworthy change is that the screen to start now has a description of what the servers do, and the screen for servers allows you to tap Next without having to choose by selecting the General random server in your local language to choose.”
Direct Messages
Questions: “I am curious why it does not have more basic features, like separation of DM’s from notifications?”
Rochko Explains that Mastodon does not have traditional DMs, and posts are only that are only available to specific users:
“Mastodon doesn’t have traditional DMs, and the various UX options are based on making it clearer. Mastodon provides a granular setting for the visibility of posts. This means you can limit the visibility of a single post (even in threads) to your only followers or those mentioned within the article. These are able to be used for similar purposes as DMs; however, with particular relation to threading and address, they’re not identical.”
Rock says that encryption of the entire transaction DMs are still on the sidelines; however, the main focus is to enhance applications that have been made official iOS and Android applications:
“We have end-to-end encrypted DMs in the back of our minds. That’s right, I’m talking about from the beginning, that they are intended to function as DMs. I began working on this feature in 2020, but it stalled at the client level. We required native applications to complete the work of developing the client-side protocols, which, at the time, did not have any. In 2021, we officially released an official iOS application, and in 2022 we launched an official Android application. Still, apps need so many requirements before they can be fully encrypted from end-to-end DMs that they’re still in the background.
Third-Party Apps
Answer: “I just want to know why you and your team focus on the iOS and Android apps since there are already other third-party apps available that could be endorsed?”
Rock says it all comes down to branding and trademarks:
“I had gone into more detail about the issue when the iOS app first came out. People search for “Mastodon” on the platforms of their app stores (in fact, 82 percent of our iOS downloads are from users who search for it, not via any websites that link to the application). We couldn’t grant our brand name to an application we had no say over (what are the consequences if the app fails to make good UX decisions or is not maintained? ) Also. We didn’t intend to take over an app that current users had already relied on and make changes to the user experience. Additionally, we’re in a unique position to have the money to invest in the best UX design. Our app development has helped us understand problems with APIs. These insights are directly fed into enhancements to server-side code that every app can profit from.”
