Big Social are no longer the innovators they were.

In actuality, for the past 10 years, most innovations in social media have been created by small, nimble players—which Big Social then attempts to either acquire or copy.

In essence, they've replaced R&D with M&A.

Thus, they probably have nothing new to add to the Fediverse.

The Fediverse is one thing that Big Social cannot acquire or copy.

No one owns the Fediverse, so that's not an option.

And to copy or integrate the Fediverse is to kill their own cash cows.

In essence, the Fediverse targets the chunk in their armour.

Big Social is obsessed with metrics, and proving value through metrics.

What metrics prove the Fediverse's value?

No one knows. Every metric regarding the Fediverse is at best conjecture. Nobody even knows its true size.

Hard to convince a CEO to buy into an idea when nothing is probable through metrics.

Nobody has validated the Fediverse as a place to make money.

Sure, tiny web-hosts might charge for services, but the average Big Social executive isn't looking to make tiny increases in a new venture. They want to 100x or 1,000x their ROI.

Somebody might eventually try this, but Big Social isn't going to be first.

Yes, Big Social has more than enough money and tech to upset the Fediverse.

What they don't have is the capacity to onboard knowledge about the Fediverse quickly and easily.

This is because the actual inner workings of the Fediverse are held by only a small handful of people.

Believe it or not, most people who work at Big Social are *not* social media nerds, and have zero interest in how the technology works.

When they look at Mastodon, their response is pretty much the same as everyone else's: they throw up their hands and say, "This is too complicated!"

And then they close their browser tab.

@atomicpoet

Chris, I have often been baffled by this: several good people I happen to know in the twitterverse, when they first experience something like #Mastodon, keep saying , 'it's too complicated'. I must be missing something that they have experienced, what it could be? If you want to post, follow, like, share, how much difference exists between twitter and this? Is it the tweetdeck like appearance of Mastodon client? Perhaps a phone client will make for easy onboarding (tusky/mtext)?