>Mastodon is only marginally more useful than IRC at this point, and is completely useless to the average person. I as a developer have yet to even figure out how it's supposed to work.
I don't know how you define "average person" but plenty of people who aren't developers are on Mastodon.
This argument that Mastodon is "too complicated" is perennial, despite the obvious evidence to the contrary in the growth of its adoption. It's particularly weird to keep seeing it on a forum full of people who think compiling software from source and working in arcane terminals is trivial.
You can just sign up for an instance like any other website (or multiple.) Or you can pay any number of hosts for an instance of your own (I use masto.host, $9.00/mo.) Or just run the activitypub plugin in Wordpress and your Wordpress is now also a Mastodon node.
It's been on a steady downward slide for the last year, from almost 2m during The Exodus to about 900k active users now. People sign up, but most don't stick around. I also can't help but notice my own timeline has slowed to a crawl, and it's mostly the same few people. It's not vibrant and busy like it used to be.
Aggressive growth and addictive velocity are cancerous, let it reach a healthy equilibrium. Slow can be good, too.
I'm following ~500 people at the moment, and getting relays from a few instances. I see a constant flow of new stuff but I can also easily leave and do other things, because Mastodon isn't designed to maximize engagement and addiction. I don't feel a constant need to post or comment or chase endorphins. The scale is just fine for me.
I was on there when it was just Mastodon.social. It was more vibrant then, and it's been more vibrant in recent memory, before it rocketed to 2m users and started falling. Something is different, and it's not good. I think people who've been there are getting fed up with problems no one seems to care about years on (even people like me who kept giving it chances and pushing for change), and new people are going somewhere else instead of trying Mastodon.
You can stick your head in the sand if you want and hope the year-long freefall stops rather than consider there might be a problem. It's what I've come to expect.
> plenty of people who aren't developers are on Mastodon
How many of them are gonna stick around once their instance goes offline, or the admin does something crazy (which isn't impossible considering how many of these are ran as personal/fun projects by geeks rather than actual businesses), or their instance gets into a feud with the others and results in defederation?
All of this is overhead. It's overhead that can be managed, or you can pay someone to manage it for you, but it's still overhead and extra problems that just don't exist when you can instead sign up for Instagram or Twitter and call it a day.
My person in deity the standard you're defending is the lunatic dumpster fire that is Twitter, where Elon just decides shit at random like "likes are private now" and "you can just pay for a checkmark" or "I'm unbanning all the nazis lol."
I personally haven't experienced any of the "overhead" of Mastodon that you're mentioning, and making seem far more common than it is, but Mastodon seems far more stable than Twitter as a platform and a community at the moment.
And sure, some people might not like it, and that's fine. There are and will always be alternatives. But anything is better than Twitter.
I don't know how you define "average person" but plenty of people who aren't developers are on Mastodon.
This argument that Mastodon is "too complicated" is perennial, despite the obvious evidence to the contrary in the growth of its adoption. It's particularly weird to keep seeing it on a forum full of people who think compiling software from source and working in arcane terminals is trivial.
You can just sign up for an instance like any other website (or multiple.) Or you can pay any number of hosts for an instance of your own (I use masto.host, $9.00/mo.) Or just run the activitypub plugin in Wordpress and your Wordpress is now also a Mastodon node.
If I can do it, it ain't that hard.