I really want to like Mastodon, and every few years I make an attempt to join. But then, I am faced with the decision of choosing a server - if I like cooking and golf, do I join the cooking server or the golf server? What if I choose <i>wrong</i>? - and the choice overload makes me just give up.<p>And even if I really joined, then apparently my server's administrator would be able to silently prevent me from seeing other "enemy" servers' messages, and they could even read my DMs.<p>I think I see the point of Mastodon, and I think it can be really advantageous for certain uses (e.g. for relatively tight communities, that want to have bonds within the community but also connections to the outside) but I just don't see its fit for the average user and especially as a replacement for the generalistic, unstructured network that is Twitter.
Eugen is playing almost all roles singlehandedly and last said he was making around 35k a year. "I do software development, devops, accounting, customer support, project management, product design, public relations, and moderation for 36K per year..."<p>please help fund the project to ensure further stability.<p><a href="https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109260715240000670" rel="nofollow">https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109260715240000670</a>
In theory federated social media seems like a great idea. You can hand-wave a lot of impossible moderation problems away just by not being so damn big. It seems like I could join for music and geeky history without being inundated with The Current Thing ragebait culture. I'd try that out!<p>In practice it's still a desert.<p>The problem isn't how to sign up, it's that with the exception of a few active communities, there's not much going on once you do.
Twitter is a great place for creatives to pitch their shows and get scooped up into a studio if you can put out some high-quality work. Mastodon doesn't seem like it has any solid use case to that end.<p>Craig McCracken, the creator of PPG and Fosters Home has consistently used his Twitter following to boost other creatives by retweeting their work and LaikaStudios has been a great place to see BTS work on their stop-motion projects.<p>These sites all seem to have some grandiose plan but at the end of the day, the long-standing use case is just a place to build a community, collaborate with like-minded people, and ultimately just take a break from real life for a few moments by scrolling down your feed to consume some content.
Mastodon is too fragmented to work... well. For example; this tweet: <a href="https://twitter.com/joinmastodon/status/1585756076305444864" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/joinmastodon/status/1585756076305444864</a>.<p>Would you really host your email on a server that some dude in rural Canada runs in his spare time? I don't think so. Not just for reliability reasons, but for privacy reasons as well.
I didn't think Mastodon would make sense for me as any kind of twiter alternative, but then I found someone created ruby.social and now it actually makes sense for me, and offers something twitter doesn't.
My anti-tech wife looked at this for 5 minutes and was horribly confused. Her friends all feel the same way - why can’t they just sign in and see all the people they want to see? What is an instance, why cant the instance be just one? Which one do they join? They all went back to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
I think most of us are missing where things are converging:<p>1. Easier to do ads as overlay on vid clips than 12 character content
2. User base is getting to trained to expect and WANT short vid clip content
3. Ease and reach of story telling via short vid clips
4. Move off of social graph to AI graph
5. Automated moderation but open where you can see what posts
were moderated and why pertaining to the rules of the SM platform.<p>What we are seeing is the move to Social 2.0.<p>1. Mark Z has the problem of how to turn FB into instagram and AI graph
@. Youtube has smaller problem of just adjusting their feed impl to AI graph
3. Twitter has the most work out of the three in that it's their full imp and infrastructure that has to change to get back to revelance.<p>True P2P has never ever won in the market of over almost 40 years. But people keep rehashing the same way of doing and structuring P2P both tech wise and business wise and losing.
I dont think Mastodon will gain mainstream adoption because of the naming, and they call messages "Toots". Normal people will baulk at the branding of it all.
Is there any space nowadays for tech that is essentially free of politicized rhetoric? I really don't care about democracy or decentralization on my social media platform. When I first discovered Tumblr, MySpace, LiveJournal, Xanga, AIM, and Twitter I didn't care about any of their techno-political underpinnings.
Predictions: Mastodon becomes platform for technically minded center left. Tribel Social becomes lower brow left version of Parler.
Twitter loses customers to aforementioned platforms but survives.
Ben Thompson put well why “Twitter, more than any social network, is <i>sui generis</i>:<p>First, the service emerged at a time and place where a text-based network was cutting edge…<p>Second, Twitter grew up in an environment where it was normal to publicly broadcast whatever it was you had to say…<p>Third, because Twitter was first, it became ground zero for everyone who was textual and had something to say, even if those folks had diametrically opposing viewpoints on everything from Donald Trump to LeBron James.”<p><a href="https://stratechery.com/2022/musks-twitter-blue-a-twitter-subscription-revisited-apple-earnings/" rel="nofollow">https://stratechery.com/2022/musks-twitter-blue-a-twitter-su...</a>
It would probably help Mastodon a lot if they contacted some of the smarter celebrities and set them up with their own personal server. You’d subscribe to Stephen King or Ryan Reynolds by subscribing to their server. They can afford to run popular servers, and there are enough of them that they can absorb a lot of the load.
For those not sure who to follow on Mastodon, I have been curating my follow list for years. Mostly people into tech, security, privacy, and digital sovereignty.<p><a href="https://mastodon.social/@lrvick/following" rel="nofollow">https://mastodon.social/@lrvick/following</a>
Things we are currently seeing going on is social debt, not technical debt. Therefore another technical solution won't fix the issue. It will just relay the social issues to a new platform which will start over again very soon.<p>You can't fix people by giving them new software.
If anything the last few days have shown that people aren't willing to pay even 8$ for twitter. How mastodon will think it will make without users or investors willing to pay for hosting is beyond me.
Centralized systems are very dangerous, moderation is a huge problem and has a massive chilling effect.<p>I support civil discourse and disagreements, I actively want to see both sides and not just an echo chamber.<p>We all have different beliefs and the only way to move forward as society is to foster open and honest conversation.<p>This is especially applicable to politically correct language and culture. Some things are uncomfortable and that’s ok. It should be.
The uptick of interest in Mastodon due to Musk buying Twitter doesn’t make sense. Only the left is angry about the acquisition. The right is gleeful. What the left is angry and the right is gleeful about is the idea that Musk is a “free speech absolutist” and might unban Donald Trump and other right wing / fascist media personalities.<p>Guess what: in the fediverse, it would never have been possible to ban Trump in the first place. Sure, leftist servers could have stop syndicating his posts, but this would not have had much more of an effect than individuals blocking him on Twitter if he had never been banned there.<p>Further, Musk hasn’t actually unbanned him yet. If this mastodon push was somehow successful, and everyone switched over, then Trump would be truly unbannable. He would run his own instance, and it would syndicated to all his fans. The people who are mad about Musk might not syndicate Trump’s posts but this wouldn’t matter.