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Nobody installs your MCP server. The ones who do don't use it.

6.7 relevance
Score Breakdown
technical depth
7
novelty
8
actionability
5
community
5
strategic
6
personal
9

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MCP server adoption analysis, insightful and relevant.

General dev.to
Nobody installs your MCP server. The ones who do don't use it.
Summary

MCP server adoption suffers two distinct failures: the technical install across incompatible clients (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code — each requiring different config formats and field names) and the 'second install' — getting users to actually make a tool call. The author's funnel shows that of users who reach the connect screen, fewer than half ever produce a single tool call, because once connected, users stare at a blank prompt and leave. The structural N×M problem (multiple clients × multiple servers) makes configuration brittle, with silent failures when field names like `url` vs `serverUrl` differ.

Author

Carl-W

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