Mastodon is benefitting from the #X exodus (eXodus?) too: The official app downloads are up 47% on iOS and 17% on Android.

Eugen Rochko

We may not be the biggest by numbers yet, but Mastodon (and the fediverse) has proven itself to be an effective and reliable communications platform over the course of the last 8 years, and does not depend on venture capital to survive. The #fediverse is the future.

Richard LaHue

@Gargron Can we expect the 1st party app on iOS to get some love? Or should we just be using the mobile web version in our browsers?

Eugen Rochko

I spent 25% of my life working on Mastodon. It's kind of wild when you think about it. When I started, Google+ was still around. We're doing what one of the most resourceful companies in the world couldn't do. It's not easy. It's always easier to just build A Website, then slap some ads on it. But the fediverse is the long game.

Jan

@Gargron Yeah, healthy growth is better than hyper growth.

Erik Uden 🥥🌴🍑

@Gargron this is how I see it too. No matter what happens: Mastodon will always be around. Twitter can just go offline any day now.

Emelia 👸🏻

@ErikUden @Gargron Mastodon will always be around if leadership and management exists to ensure it stay around, otherwise it'll fork into Elephant or something.

You need good people skills at the top to keep everyone involved happy, ignoring issues doesn't make them go away.

Emelia 👸🏻

@ErikUden @Gargron there's plenty of examples of open source projects and platforms that failed because they didn't have the right leadership.

There's also plenty where the original leader didn't grow with the needs of the project or burnt out and a fork happens.

Erik Uden 🥥🌴🍑

@thisismissem @Gargron By my words I didn't want to imply that your (very wonderful) work was meaningless or claim Mastodon as a project just exists by default, but rather that the idea of a decentralized network shutting down completely is unheard of.

Emelia 👸🏻

@ErikUden @Gargron manyverse all but failed, and that was arguably more decentralized. Node.js almost failed, too.

Renaud Chaput

@shoren18 we just hired a full time iOS developer (thanks to the donations we get) and she already started improving it. We have big plans here!

Dave Winer ☕️

@Gargron

two big advantages of fediverse.

1. it can't be bought by Elon Musk or someone like Elon Musk, can't suffer the fate of twitter.

2. doesn't have the limits of other platforms. this is something we're building on in conjunction with @pfefferle and his colleagues at Automattic.

The second one is enabling textcasting -- which will make mastodon specifically more useful to writers. The other platforms, not so much.