-Money for a big marketing campaign, and reaching famous people.
-A better first comer UX.
First one is hard to solve. But UX in Mastodon should be solved. Local and federated feeds are useless, specially on the "default" .social instance. They need to find a way for new users to be able to see a relevant feed of toots and to have an easier time finding people they'd like to interact with.
It is a solvable problem, I hope someday it could be done.
That is the only likely future ahead. BS is growing so fast that there's no way they can sustain this growth even if they add ads. The only path forward is selling out. I think Microsoft might be interested in finally owning a popular social media site.
Won't happen. Not necessarily the them not buying it part, but it staying popular at all. No site/program is too big for Microsoft to torpedo. Skype used to be the verb for voice calls before they got their hands on it.
BlueSky is really just Twitter pretending to be Mastodon, but that's a minor issue compared to the problems associated with platforms like "X" and TikTok today.
What matters most right now is killing off Twitter and breaking up the dominance of any one platform on social media. I really don't care where people go as long as they get the fuck off of Twitter and TikTok. Mastodon and open platforms will eventually win out in a divided social media ecosystem anyway, in my opinion. Divide and conquer.
I think a lot of the future of social media is going to be determined by ease of use/beginner-friendliness.
The issue (and strength) with Lemmy is there's multiple instances. You're not gonna be able to explain it to non-technical people, even as an experienced programmer myself I sometimes find myself getting confused by Lemmy. People don't want to learn, they just want to use something that works.
Then again, KBin only had the one instance pretty much I think, and yet that died out anyway. So I think part of it is people just want to go where everyone else is, and that did end up being Lemmy and not KBin (although the maintainer of KBin also refused outside contributions which helped seal its fate lol)
If Bluesky has the one instance, and you literally just go to bsky.app and sign up, that's going to be a lot easier than trying to sell people on Mastodon or Lemmy when they Google those. Then again, I just googled Mastodon and it took me right to Mastodon.social so maybe I am mistaken.
Threads is honestly terrible. There are these asinine little widgets on Instagram that show you threads that people have posted and don't show you the full one so you click see more and it brings you to the app store. But no one really uses it much, so you see a lot of things being posted with no interaction at all
I think "leave" is doing some heavy lifting, but I could see plenty of people creating accounts as the site reaches a large enough user base to attract the general public.
I saw a video recently of somebody talking about how they were posting the same thing on Twitter and Bluesky, and despite having a fraction of the followers on Bluesky, the post there had like 6x the engagement compared to Twitter. As they put it, "The creatives have moved to Bluesky."
I've heard of people having similar experiences on Mastodon as well. Seems like these smaller communities of early adopters tend to simply be more active and pleasant to interact with.
I don't think "creatives" are more active than anyone else. For the number of users, the threadiverse has a higher ratio of activity I think and it's generally more positive here than places like reddit. Maybe it's a similar thing. The demographic that are likely to move, are just making similar content and that makes it look more active.
Yeah i have the same feeling about it, but its like that buzzword AI. If AI company fails its always the "AI" but no one understood what AI did in that project.