It is my personal belief that Mastodon will never be as popular as any mainstream or even alt-tech social media, as it isn’t attractive enough for content creators and normies to come over, due to the lack of content/engagement.

Mastodon is a vastly superior social media when compared to other microblogging sites such as Parlor or X. However, after the federated social media hype died down after the Reddit API protest went nowhere, I have come to the conclusion that Mastodon will probably never achieve large success when it comes to the general populace.

One reason why it won’t be able to be sucessful among normies is because of a “chicken and egg problem”. Imagine you are a content creator that has a X account with a large amount of followers and you hear about the social media called Mastodon. However, you probably won’t move to it, because there isn’t a big audience on Mastodon, especially if your content is more gaming/pop culture focused. From my Mastodon feed and discover page, it is usually populated with 1. People talking about their lives; 2. Leftist politics; 3, Linux and other tech news. Most of the people on Mastodon won’t subscribe to your type of content, so it’s not worth moving. And if you’re a user of X and don’t make content, you won’t move to Mastodon if you don’t like the above content I talked about. So nobody moves and everybody just stays on the horrible social media that they are on.

Unlike alt-right social media, Masotdon doesn’t have a Donald Trump to drive users to the platform. It just haves decent people talking about sane things, and no brainrot/ragebait to keep your mind on a drip 24/7.

Lemmy, on the other hand doesn’t have this problem, because it is more centered around the content of the posts, and not the users who post the posts. That’s why it doesn’t have a karma system, unlike Reddit.

Overall, I really just think that although Mastodon will continue to grow and attract Linux people and other “nerds” and cool people, it ultimately won’t be able to cross the boundary to becoming a mainstream social media. The only way it possibly could is X shutting down and forcing all creators and users to find a new platform. But not having normies on Mastodon isn’t really a bad thing. Everybody has nice and civilized conversations and there aren’t any ragebaitters or onlyfans girls flooding my feed or comment section with basically spam. So yeah, I like Mastodon and encourage you to use it!!!