It's an exceptional growth period for the servers. Twitter used to have failwhales, and gmail used to require invitations. It will stabilize. (And, if you happen to be interested and have the skillset, you could deploy your own instance. I wouldn't be surprised if there's already a VPS provider that already has pushbutton mastodon deployment in place.)
So, it's exactly like signing up for gmail if gmail was down and you had to either wait for them to fix it at some undetermined point in the future, find another email provider or set up your own email server instead.
Much of the history of the Internet has been exactly like that. New services (or new-you-you) constantly going down with an influx of new users, services (like email) that allow anyone to set up their own machine ... this mild and temporary inconvenience is familiar. A week from now it will be fine.
But I think that's the important point. Right now, there's nothing wrong with Mastodon. Mastodon is working fine. A couple of servers that people commonly encounter first are having growth issues. But those servers aren't Mastodon any more than Gmail is email.
Well, I would say it's a problem that a lot of people are trying to join the fediverse and it's currently quite difficult and confusing to do so.
I would further say there's a marketing problem that Mastodon advocates keep saying this situation is normal, expected and it's working fine, which is obviously quite offputting.
It is a community project, there isn't a centralized marketing message or anything like that. If the community is growing as fast as their servers can handle it, that seems like a fine situation?
> A couple of servers that people commonly encounter first are having growth issues. But those servers aren't Mastodon any more than Gmail is email.
And that's what a lot of tech people don't get, to normies actually Gmail does equal Email and such. You're not going to get the bulk of everyday people on these platforms until you think in their shoes and provide features (and don't have downtime on your main servers) that fit their experiences.
> to normies actually Gmail does equal Email and such
I'd love to hear of some evidence for that. I've never encountered anyone assuming that the bit after the @ has to be gmail.com, or being unclear and uncertain if they can communicate between their work Outlook account and their home Gmail account. This feels very much like someone's taken the idea "to most people, the internet just is the web" and run wild with it.
> So, it's exactly like signing up for gmail if gmail was down and you had to either wait for them to fix it at some undetermined point in the future, find another email provider or set up your own email server instead.
GMail was invite only for a very long time at the beginning fwiw
It's also exactly like when people on the right started leaving twitter and all these alternatives popped up.
And in the end, people (who left willingly) ended up back on twitter anyway just because people kept sharing things from there. But also because the alternative services could not keep up with the momentum, resulting in degraded service. So everyone seemed to collectively go "meh" and returned to twitter.
I predict everyone will be back on twitter once all this blows over, and especially if alternatives can't keep up. Uptime and reliability seem to be more important than features, freedom, or just about anything else.
I remember the failwhale days, but this is different.
Twitter is a VC-backed company that had the resources to build out their infrastructure.
Mastodon is a bunch of volunteer-run servers and it looks pretty obvious they aren’t going to be able to handle the infusion of new users… unless there’s an infusion of resources.
I’m on mastodon.social and it has slowed to a crawl, compared to what I was used to 6 months ago.
Also the UI/UX isn’t great. Say what you will about Twitter, but they’ve built a pretty slick web application and native apps. People used to the simplicity of Twitter are going to struggle, if the complaints on my Twitter timeline are any indication.
There is an infusion of resources. One option that seems common is that users aren't required to contribute towards hosting fees, but donations are easily accepted -- that is how the sustainable ones work from what I have seen. It seems to work pretty well?
It's very transparent, which I like -- "we got a bunch of new users, the server bill is going up $2k a month overall so if you can pitch in please do" is extremely clear and seems to work effectively. An individual server seems like it should be able to charge for hosting your account like with email if it needed to be operated like a business.
So far it doesn't really seem like it needs to operate like a business, it just takes longer for collectives of humans to respond to changes in needs than a giant enormously wealthy company that knew what would happen in advance. I'm sure it will equilibrate, it has the last two times this happened.
