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The turmoil at Twitter has created a huge opportunity for Mastodon to fill the vacuum. Despite some aggressive growth, it has failed to scale.I want to talk about why and what this means for your product in terms of being ready for opportunities to scale.Related Article - https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2023/jan/08/elon-musk-drove-more-than-a-million-people-to-mastodon-but-many-arent-sticking-aroundIf you want to reach product-market fit faster, sign up for my free 5 day email course here - https://nxtstep.io/fit/Episode TranscriptHey, folks, Sean here.And today what I want to talk to you about iswhy Mastodon has failed to scale, despite the fact that Twitterhas done everything in its power to send as many oftheir users as possible over to that platform.Just in case you're unaware, there's been quite a bitof turmoil going on over Twitter, and every time somethingmajor hits the news, a new wave of users goesfrom Twitter over to a platform called Mastodon.Now, if you're unfamiliar with what Mastodon is,it's essentially an open source equivalent to Twitter.It's got a relatively similar user experience,or it's considered by many to bethe most similar product on the market.And as such, many were expecting it tokind of fill the vacuum that Twitter seemsto have been creating all on its own.But despite that fact, and despite the factthat in a single day when it wasat its peak growth rate from converting usersfrom Twitter over to mastodon, those numbers whereover 100,000 users per day are leaving Twitter.And joining mastodon.Not only have they failed to continue to scaleat that rate, that trend has since somewhat reverseditself almost as aggressively as it was once growing.So the question here is why?Why has Mastodon failed to scale despite havingthis tremendous opportunity, it seems, to kind offill the vacuum that Twitter has been creating.Like I said, all on its own.In fact, there's a great chart and article fromthe Guardian about this event that has taken place,and it's overlaid essentially in a series of atimeline where there is a chart reflecting the growthof Mastodon and when new waves of users havespiked joining their platform.And that timeline of events is also mappedto when controversial things have happened at Twitter,or just things like Elon Musk taking over,but him announcing massive layoffs, him doing reallyquestionable things, or Twitter doing very questionable thingslike banning journalists and things like that.Every time any one of these controversial things havetaken place, mastodon has seen a massive spike inuser activity and people joining the platform.But despite the fact that that's been happening inalmost rapid succession over time, giving macedon time andtime again opportunities to capitalize or benefit from thislevel of scale, not only has that growth kindof stalled or stopped, it's reversed itself and almostaggressively as it was once growing.So ultimately, what looks like is happening nowis people aren't adopting the Mastodon platform.In fact, many of them are probably actually goingback to Twitter, which is really interesting trend, despitethe fact that the motivation was probably pretty highgiven the fact of what has taken place morerecently over at Twitter for them to join reallyany other platform that can meet that need.And that's what I want to talk about now.Probably the biggest reason why Mastodon has really failedto continue their aggressive growth and scale is forsomething that I talked about before, which is veryimportant in order to really nail a product experience,and that's the user experience.The usability of Mastodon is verydifferent than that of Twitter.It is much harder to use, quite a bitmore complex, and requires the user to have todo things that they really don't have to doto get the same experience out of Twitter.In addition to that, the feature set which isprominent over Twitter, is not really all there whenit comes to the Mastodon experience as such, becauseit's been hard to make that transition for users.They're not sticking around.I think what they were probably all hoping forwas a relatively similar experience to that of Twitter.They were looking to kind of fill the voidin the value that they were getting from thefeature set that's been popularized over at Twitter.But Macedon largely just doesn't offer it, or doesn't offerit in the way that the users have yet foundto satisfy what their need was from before.And this is why they're either quitting social media ormany of them are flocking back over to Twitter.So this really underscores the level ofimportance of nailing the product experience.And what's interesting here is that Twitterdoesn't really have dramatically complicated tech.In fact, there are many programming languages likestarter courses like Ruby on Rails, which issomething that I took many years ago.That part of one of the larger but earlier projectsthat they actually have you do to really get familiarizedwith the language is building a Twitter clone.I mean, if you think about thetech that goes into making the Twitterexperience, it's really not all that complicated.As such, I'm surprised that another platform has yet tokind of take the reins here because this is agolden opportunity to satisfy a bunch of users who arefrustrated by what's going on at that social media company.Yet it really still has yet to happen.And I would point to the largest reason forthat not happening is that user experience, the usability.So this really underscores the level of importance.There something that might not seem as important fromtime to time, but when we see lessons likethese, it really underscores its level of importance.So this is why, to me, the aestheticor the user interface is not as importantanywhere near so as the user experience.Because despite this golden opportunity, right,mastodon has yet to capitalize it.And largely I feel it's because ofthe difference in the user experience, becauseMastodon's is significantly more complicated.So I know the two of thoseconcepts are often talked about together.People often refer to them as UI UX.In fact, there's usually slash in betweenthem whenever either one is mentioned.And I feel like they are dramatically they'resignificantly different enough to the point where theylargely probably shouldn't be lumped together in thesame category because I've seen great UIs withterrible UX's and vice versa.So it's really important to nail UX andin the way that they reflect that.UI is always mentioned first, andI feel like that's a mistake.It always should be user experience first becauseyou're creating the right type of user experience.Something like this would not happen.In fact, Mastodon had every opportunity inthe world to scale here really aggressively,yet it's failed to happen.I think l...