The quicker the technorati accept that Mastadon will never have mass adoption even remotely close to Twitter, the better. Glad Mastadon is doing its thing being like the IRC of twitter or whatever, but there's absolutely no way it ever truly competes. It should just be happy being a niche product for a niche audience.
In the past two weeks, the Mastodon-compatible parts of the Fediverse have gone from 600K active users to 7M active users. George Takei and Elvira are on Mastodon. We'll see how things develop, but this doesn't feel niche anymore.
The Mastadon hype here has serious "year of the Linux desktop" vibes -- technical people getting excited about features that don't matter at all to the average user.
Until journalists, politicians, musicians, artists, and brands can have their posts go viral into the feeds of tens of millions of (unwilling) users, it doesn't replace what makes Twitter valuable.
I tell everyone I know to check Mastodon out, but that IMHO, it's fundamentally flawed for what most people expect from Twitter. Simply because Mastodon has a NUMBER of major issues which include deep, hard to resolve issues. For example:
You MUST trust your administrators of the server, who in many cases just set the server up to 'help the community'. It's admirable of them to to it, but running any kind of server takes time, energy and effort for no pay. It can be a rough gig, see no further than 'mastodon.technology' for an example of what happens when 'life happens'.
Migration from one server to another is on a "Mother may I" basis, where you have to have permission from both ends to enact the transfer. If your 'I joined this Mastodon server because I couldn't find another' decides to shut down in a couple of months, good luck getting that history back.
The server relay feature is hap-dash at best, and both of the top two Mastodon servers don't even support the feature.
Those three issues are just scratching the top of the problems. At the end of the day, if Mastodon works for you, great. However don't lie to people by telling them that it is a full replacement for every Twitter user. It isn't.
Technically its the Fediverse, not just Mastodon. But, your point still stands 100% that there exists mechanisms in place already to achieve what this new thing is proposing to do.
Of course, to each their own; if Mr. Bardin has the time/resources, i guess good luck to him. Though, I do wish smart folks like he and others would help move forward the existing protocols like ActivityPub, or participate in efforts like Spritely Institute (https://spritely.institute/). I'm convinced optimizing decentralization mechanisms helps us all (and, no, i'm not referring to "crypto" when i use the term "decentralization" here).
I just spent 30 minutes trying to figure out the best way to follow my interests on Mastodon. I had to figure out which instance to use, and the most popular ones cannot keep up with the traffic surge right now. And then I don't know how much the instance matters, can I follow a hashtag across all instances? It seems yes, but I spent time figuring this out.
How much time will the average twitter user invest into this? How much will it cost these hobbyists to run Ruby on Rails apps that can service hundreds of millions of users? I'm just...skeptical it can take off. Whereas something VC funded that can monetize and its just one thing you point people to, and they can sign up in 30 seconds and it handles all the traffic with no hiccups or slow-downs. That could work.
Well any particular Mastodon server can end up ruined or with ads. Or shutdown.
Reminds me of the early days of email when people used their local ISP hosts for their personal email addresses. So every time you moved or whatever your email address changed.
Mastodon at least opens up space for experiments. Lots of interesting possibilities.
If you think that Mastodon cannot be bought and ruined by billionaires, you are wrong.
It's all too easy to imagine a (medium-term) future in which the largest Mastodon instance (or something highly compatible with it) will have more than half of the population of Mastodon in it, include advertisements in-feed, and make policy decisions that affect the rest of the Fediverse.
Sure, there are embrace-and-extinguish scenarios with decentralized protocols. But the alternative is that you’re always in the grip of some billionaire’s fever dream right from the start. Mastodon is live and resilient right now. The future is up to the users.
It’s sounds like everyone has to join specific servers or something. That will never work, it’s too complicated. You need one server that everyone is on.
Having "one server that everyone is on" is precisely what we don't need. Twitter sucks because it's a single room dominated by a bunch of shouting jagoffs, and "that, but federated" isn't any better. Mastodon is nicer because your home instance is small and intimate.
Only former Twitter employees can join that server, it's not meant to be a place for users who want to emulate the Twitter biases or something. It's meant to be a community of Twitter alumni.
crsv|3 years ago
NoGravitas|3 years ago
ceres|3 years ago
> Glad Mastadon is doing its thing being like the IRC of twitter or whatever, but there's absolutely no way it ever truly competes
A good thing about open source software is that any kinks can be fleshed out over time through contributions and forks.
Think about how many non-technical people run WordPress blogs on the internet.
mjr00|3 years ago
Until journalists, politicians, musicians, artists, and brands can have their posts go viral into the feeds of tens of millions of (unwilling) users, it doesn't replace what makes Twitter valuable.
pnemonic|3 years ago
davoneus|3 years ago
You MUST trust your administrators of the server, who in many cases just set the server up to 'help the community'. It's admirable of them to to it, but running any kind of server takes time, energy and effort for no pay. It can be a rough gig, see no further than 'mastodon.technology' for an example of what happens when 'life happens'.
Migration from one server to another is on a "Mother may I" basis, where you have to have permission from both ends to enact the transfer. If your 'I joined this Mastodon server because I couldn't find another' decides to shut down in a couple of months, good luck getting that history back.
The server relay feature is hap-dash at best, and both of the top two Mastodon servers don't even support the feature.
Those three issues are just scratching the top of the problems. At the end of the day, if Mastodon works for you, great. However don't lie to people by telling them that it is a full replacement for every Twitter user. It isn't.
mxuribe|3 years ago
Of course, to each their own; if Mr. Bardin has the time/resources, i guess good luck to him. Though, I do wish smart folks like he and others would help move forward the existing protocols like ActivityPub, or participate in efforts like Spritely Institute (https://spritely.institute/). I'm convinced optimizing decentralization mechanisms helps us all (and, no, i'm not referring to "crypto" when i use the term "decentralization" here).
jeremyjh|3 years ago
How much time will the average twitter user invest into this? How much will it cost these hobbyists to run Ruby on Rails apps that can service hundreds of millions of users? I'm just...skeptical it can take off. Whereas something VC funded that can monetize and its just one thing you point people to, and they can sign up in 30 seconds and it handles all the traffic with no hiccups or slow-downs. That could work.
WC3w6pXxgGd|3 years ago
[deleted]
KVFinn|3 years ago
Reminds me of the early days of email when people used their local ISP hosts for their personal email addresses. So every time you moved or whatever your email address changed.
Mastodon at least opens up space for experiments. Lots of interesting possibilities.
anonporridge|3 years ago
noasaservice|3 years ago
Too true. And in cases like that, I have already blocked bitcoinhackers.org .
And it's trivial to block individuals OR whole servers from your account. And server admins can block as well to the whole server.
So, sure, go ahead and make a spam-stodon. You'll be defederated within a week.
standardUser|3 years ago
krapp|3 years ago
johnday|3 years ago
It's all too easy to imagine a (medium-term) future in which the largest Mastodon instance (or something highly compatible with it) will have more than half of the population of Mastodon in it, include advertisements in-feed, and make policy decisions that affect the rest of the Fediverse.
KerrAvon|3 years ago
bergenty|3 years ago
kibwen|3 years ago
leeroyjenkins11|3 years ago
[deleted]
KoftaBob|3 years ago