this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025
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They are also the main developers of the Mastodon software. It is not just hosting the service. The software needs to be able to compete with Bluesky and right now it quite simply does not. The only way to get the quality needed is to have some full time lead developers. Also they need some proper admins to run the websites. Mastodon social is at 250,000 active users right now, but it is also fairly likely to grow fast with what Elon is up to with Twitter. Just to compare Twitter used to have 7500 employees, with a 1000 today.
Mastodon has a 5 year headstart over Bluesky. Bluesky has more users, large players already getting into it and is raising money and is not ashamed to to be actively looking for a business model.
Meanwhile, Mastodon completely blew the opportunity it got when Musk bought Twitter and keeps repeating the same mistake of preaching to the converted.
What makes you think that more money would solve it? Their problem is not a lack of money, but a lack of ambition.
I don't agree at all with the lack of ambition.
Well the fact is yes, Mastodon is still relatively small compared to Facebook, X or Bluesky. Mastodon has actually 7,616,908 users total: https://fedidb.org/software/mastodon. Which is a huge number, but most likely a lot of bot accounts and non-active account to be honest.
Now the reason why is Mastodon is not as large as Bluesky is debatable. I actually blame ActivityPub protocol and the complex nature of trying to become a federated platform.
Let's be honest now, most people do not care (or don't have the technical knowledge) to understand federation or decentralization. Hence people will just jump to the easiest solution: A big centralized server, aka X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Bluesky. Same for search engines like Google.
The problem is not with the federated model, per se. Matrix is federated and it has 100M+ users.
The problem is a cultural one: Mastodon promoted federation along the idea that instances should be aligned with its member's identity. It's a mistake of their own doing, which was reflected on their own UX and marketing copy for a long time.