@manton marketing budgets

@manton in my experience, it's not much more complicated than "it's easier, more attractive, and more fun". Those aren't the only things that matter, but they do matter to millions.

@z428 For your (c), I agree although I think that hurts monthly active users more than initial sign-ups. Of course, it’s not just one thing and a lot of factors contribute.

@anildash Yeah. Mastodon has improved the sign-up process by pointing folks to mastodon.social, but Bluesky is still easier to sign up and discover users. I’m fascinated by the “more fun” too… My Bluesky timeline definitely leans more toward playful, lighthearted.

@manton @anildash I'd very much like us to find a better way to re-connect your social network. I think if the Mastodon app used a privacy-preserving way to check your mobile contacts and see where they are on the fediverse, we'd have a lot better stickiness here. Global people search would also help a lot.

@manton @anildash We were overly dependent on Twitter for re-building your social network, and when the API rules changed, it got a lot harder to onboard.

@manton @anildash with less clothes and more feet pics.

@evan @anildash It’s interesting that Mastodon’s server-centric discovery can be both good and bad. Great if you find a server with “your people”, but network-wide discovery could more easily surface mainstream accounts to follow. (It’s hard, and just showing popular users has its own problems.)

@manton what do you mean how they've done it? People have missed twitter since elon took over. Bsky is almost identical. Where's the confusion

@manton @anildash yeah, I'm less interested in a fixed list of celebs (sorry, Anil) and more in connecting with my friends, family, colleagues and neighbours.

@manton @anildash I loved debirdify and fedifinder. We really got rug-pulled on that, but we need to find an alternative. I think Gravatar is a good candidate, but we have to shift towards it.

@manton nobody tells you there to put a content warning on a photo of food, that's for the start.

@evan

I've really been enjoying using Street Pass, which is obviously not a useful thing for a new user, but serves a kind of different interest point. When I'm casually going along my web browsing, I can find out whether or not a page I visited has an associated Mastodon user to connect with.

https://streetpass.social/

@manton @anildash