8 years on, Mastodon is still failing because it’s so hard to use https://v.cx/2025/04/mastodon-exit-interview

(For clarity, mastodon is not failing - that was my apparently bad attempt at sarcasm. Please see my response to this post for more details)

Mastodon Exit Interview

I am currently winding down the Mastodon bots I used to post sunrise and sunset times. The precipitating event is that the admin of the instance hosting the associated accounts demanded they be made nigh-undiscoverable, but the underlying cause is that it’s become increasing clear that Mastodon isn’t, and won’t ever be, a good platform for “asynchronous ephemeral notifications of any kind”. I’d also argue (more controversially) that it’s simply not good infrastructure for social networking of any kind. There are lots of interesting people using Mastodon, and I’m sure it will live on as a good-enough space for certain niche groups. But there is no question that it will never offer the fun of early Twitter, let alone the vibrancy of Twitter during its growth phase. I’ve long since dropped Mastodon from my home screen, and have switched to Bluesky for text-centric social media.

Rob’s Posts

to clarify, my comment about mastodon failing is sarcasm - there have been sooo many articles written in the years I’ve been here about mastodon failing, and yet here we all are.

All that said, there are some real issues I agree with in the post, and there is some whiny entitled person stuff I don’t agree with.

The Mastodon team continues to make improvements all the time. I cannot tell you how much better mastodon is today than it was when I first started infosec.exchange over 8 years ago. Huge difference! They are a very small team and have constrained resources. So, if we want to see changes, we have to help them out. The best way, by the way, is donating to the Mastodon organization to support their development (see joinmastodon.org for details)

@jerry The best way to help out is writing code.