@stefko a couple of reasons!!

1. I almost never find myself feeling satisfied/entertained by any of my feeds compared to my other social media (tumblr, reddit, and used to be twitter before it got bad). In conversation I attribute this to lack of curation algorithm, but that can only be part of the truth since I've used tumblr for 1h/day at least for over a decade and theyve only just now created an algorithm.
But tumblr, I feel, is much more optimized for sharing and spreading posts through reblogging; I see maybe 1-2 original posts from the original poster per day, compared to the hundreds or thousands of reblogged posts.

Tumblr doesnt have a profile page that makes you feel like you're following a person; you have your blog, the person isn't central but the content they repost. I think this creates a different type of culture. Standard posts in my feed have 10k-50k "notes". Here, much like twitter, I feel focus and pressure is more on creating ones own content. with the unfortunate truth that even the coolest most awesome people, when unfiltered, are pretty boring.

I would say that it is lack of interaction but it isn't, again, most tumblr posts that I reblog generate 0 notifications for me. but the goal there isnt that. Here, when not recieving notifications, it feels lonely. Much lonelier than tumblr or even reddit.

The second half to this is that I find mastodon to attract a certain personality type; I feel many people are here because they like the technology. On tumblr we just kinda dislike it, we complain about how it works and how broken it is. Here I feel a lot of people view themselves as better than others. which i guss was also the case on tumblr back in like 2013-2014 but unlike then, here I don't feel like I am part of the in-group.

I've tried a couple of different instances and so far, I think its a case of "the medium is the message".

Something about how this site is designed fosters a type of interaction where I feel much more like I have to be a person. This feels much more like a social media where I have to maintain a persona or a brand, or represent myself.

In order to spend that energy, there has to be something addictive in it too. Like twitters ridiculously addictive feed, or bluesky's interaction-follower ratio.

But basically I havent been able to curate an interesting or entertaining feed here. Not for lack of trying.

So I go here every now and then, especially after hanging out with nerd friends IRL who are here, I make some posts, get some interactions, but once the notifications start to wane and the feed is full of boomer memes, tired old observations that tumblr was talking about a decade ago, and super long technical or political rants... then I have no real reason to stay.

I feel like mastodon, by being difficult to use, self selects for a certain person. It is very white, very engineer heavy, very stem-heavy, and very man-heavy.

Even us non men who are on here, the format still self selects for those of us who thrive in that type of environment.

You wouldn't find the party gays here. or the k-pop stans, the tiktok dance girlies. not the meming ruthless 17 year olds, not the goofballs.

Mastodon has made me theorise that maybe the higher the intellectual barrier of entry, the boringer a medium becomes.

An online ecosystem is dependent on the humanities people, the art students, the people like my cousin who is super funny but couldnt care less about most things that arent basketball or his dog. And people like him are simply not here.

Which makes a lot of sense. The other day I wanted to mass follow people from my partners profile. To follow someone from a different instance I have to click follow, be taken to a different page, fill in a pop up with my current instance, then click follow, and then close the tab.

For something that is 1 click on every other social media.

My cousin would fall asleep if I tried to explain instances to him.

I think for an internet to be awesome, it has to be free flowing. Federation to me becomes like walled gardens. This is like the 5th instance I'm in, this one is the most active I've found so far.

On tumblr you just join tumblr and then youre on it.

I dont mind the federation i think its a super cool idea, I like the idea of servers and stuff.

But i think right now, mastodon is so, so unfamiliar to the "normal" person that they give up before getting into it. Which leaves me with a homogenous feed of nerds.

Like your survey asked about, if I had more interactions then maybe. But that would also mean people would have to see my bad posts. And I would have to see other peoples bad posts.

For me, I think things like reddit, twitter, tiktok, etc, where I dont have to see flop posts, is better for me. On tumblr we joke that content on tumblr gets "peer reviewed".

If an addition to a post is boring or too long, you click the source and reblog from the source without the bad addition. And the best ones get the most circulated. boring, long or annoying additions will only really be seen by that persons followers.

even if i love my friends i dont usually wanna see multi paragraph rant posts (like this one!!) from them. Then I liked twitter more, where my irl friends would post, and the content I see would be sorted for me, where the funniest things or whatever was the discussion of the day, would be shown to me first.

I also in general think that any social media where people might use their real names, or are encourage to connect their irl self to their online self, will be more boring bc people will limit themselves by what they think others will think. they wont be as unhinged. they wont post about gay sex or whatever.

Even if I dont have my name or photo here, people here can see who i follow, they can see who follows me.

The lack of sorting of the best posts i think makes it so there isnt the same pressure to be funny like twitter had. twitter had a culture where you want to say entertaining, quippy things.

This place is neither anonymous and unhinged like tumblr, nor is it nerdy with strangers about your specific interests w user curated feeds like reddit (where you can easily jump into a group on any topic you like, and have the chance to discuss with strangers who share the interests), nor is it simple, digestible, "fast food" where fast and fun or engaging is premiered like old twitter, nor is there an evil addictive algorithm like tiktok, nor does it make me feel like I can comfortably just anonymously relax and consume like on youtube.

Mastodon is kinda the worst of all of these. which is too bad. because i too want to stick it to the man. but I just can't seem to get hooked here.

I know this was super super long but I figured since you're doing research maybe it might be helpful if I let my whole entire rant out