Asking genuinely: do people still use Mastodon? It boomed briefly when Musky took twitter but for whatever reason, people decided to go to the data harvesting, ad filled blue sky. I never got either of them but have been recently thinking of mastodon but assumed people don’t still use it.
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2026
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according to https://piefed.zip/c/fedigrow/p/1122722/growth-of-the-fediverse-20260222 it's the most popular Fediverse platform by far.
Too bad it's not interoperable with lemmy. It would be cool if their accounts could see a link or crosspost to a post here, pop over and read it from their interface, comment, whatever.
I'm not sure if this is sarcasm, but in case it's not, you very much can read and post to Lemmy via a mastodon account.
I haven't seen any crossover and I've been on here half of the winter.
I can see you on Mastodon
Is there anyway to post on Mastodon from your lemmy account or will everything just show up as a reply?
You can usually tell when someone is posting via mastodon as they'll leave in the @ usernames
Mastodon users can take part in Lemmy discussions and subscribe to Lemmy communities. To post in a Lemmy community simply mention the Lemmy community (@LemmyCommunity@LemmyInstance.tld) in a Mastodon post. The first paragraph of the Mastodon post will display in Lemmy as the title, the rest will be the text body. Hashtags won't be displayed in Lemmy.
Does this data take into account that any posts on Lemmy/Piefed are automatically also posts on Mastodon (and comments are replies) but this doesn’t necessarily happen the other way around?
do people still use Mastodon?
Yes. Every single day, we see hundreds, if not thousands of posts.
Scientists and mathematicians do. The rest will follow when bluesky's monetisation strategy becomes too unbearable
I briefly tried mastadon. I don't like the format, it's a twitter basically, the federation is a plus, but the entire thing is a popularity contest. Almost all engagement is driven by those with large follower counts, 99 percent of posts are seen by almost no one.
Which is ok if you want to build a following, but for your everyday user, reddit or lemmy is more egalitarian, your posts, and your comments, can be considered on their own merit regardless of your follower count.
You need to use hashtags on mastodon, otherwise nobody will be able to find you!
Yes, I have two active accounts. The autistic and neurodivergent communities there are great.
Oh wow. That’s great to hear! I have, since commenting, set up an account myself. App seems a little bit buggy but, I don’t plan on being on it a lot. I appreciate the interesting feedback from you and the others who took the time to reply.
The only issue I have with mastodon is the federation gets a bit janky (so does Lemmy tbh) but it's more noticeable on mastodon. My main account is on autistics.life, which is federated with most instances except threads and the maga types, but very often I can't see images on mastodon.social posts via my main account. In fact I can't even see a lot of my older mastodon.social posts via my main account without viewing the post via my alt account and then account switching.
I've seen people say to avoid using mastodon.social as your main account.
I use the Tusky app, but it has a tendency to crash, especially when typing hash tags.
I never really even thought to research that much. I scanned the different instances. I joined into privacysafe.social - it seemed fine. Being that I have only been on it for a few hours and have only followed 9 accounts, I can’t say I’ve noticed many issues regarding my feed at this point. Although I wish I could organize my feed by newest first. It doesn’t seem to be that way by default. I have just had a couple minor bugs with profile pages loading strangely.
You won't notice issues until you get an alt account on a different instance. Often you'll not see the full number of replies to a post for instance.
I try it every now and again but I simply don't "get" the format. This isn't an issue wtih Mastodon, it's just that style of social media, I had the same issue with Twitter. The vast majority of content seems to be people just dumping their thoughts into a post. I think it's because I have no interest in following people, but topics, which I find that Lemmy/Reddit easier to follow.
That’s an interesting point and I think you maybe phrased how I’ve felt about twitter and twitter style social media as compared to lemmy/reddit sites. I agree with you there 100%.
Yea, but it's growth is limited. People seem incapable of using a platform if there isn't an algorithm telling them what to look at.
gotta find loads of interesting accounts & hashtags, to basically tailor your feed manually, then it can feel very lively. I follow 500 accounts and it has given pretty unique feed compared to bluesky.
I do, but almost no-one else I'd want to follow does, which makes it feel pointless at the moment. Quite a few 'celebrities' (for want of a better word) seem to have dormant accounts. One of the few people I know who is posting regularly is Bernie Sanders.
I love it. There are very few arseholes on it.
I think the reason why people decided to go with Bluesky is because it’s easier to sign up for. Most people on here are pretty technically inclined, so its hard for them to understand, but the process of picking a server to make an account on is complicated enough to screen out a sizeable fraction of potential users (then waiting for your application for that server to be approved creates an other hurdle for certain people).
Yep, the vast majority of people will pick the path of least resitance, and signing up to centralised services are usually very familiar and easy. Throw in the concept of instances / servers, and suddenly people are confused - they don't know what that means for their experience and it gives them a choice paralysis.
I mean the whole blog post is just advertising disguised as advocacies really though, would be good if there was something like this made by people without an ulterior motive
Especially as the UK porn ban has been a HUGE boon to those VPN providers, suddenly gaining literally millions of customers
Edit: Honestly, I think all those VPNs are secretly lobbying in favor of these kind of stupid laws cause those laws are good for their bottom line
Wasn't aware that this is a 4K video and my lemmy UI doesn't have option to play at lower scale (not sure if lemmy itself has this feature). Accidentally crashed my phone lol
failed to load media 🥲
The full length video (4:20 one) appears to be broken on their website. Anyone got a copy?
The rest load fine (30 and 15s ones).
Dude..... where's my car?
Pretty effective ad, it’s AI filled though, right?