Bastian AllgeierThe success of Mastodon and the Fediverse is not the success of a new platform. It’s a potentially groundbreaking change for the internet. No traditional social media platform will be able to compete with this anymore once the network effects kick in here. And it’s looking very good at the moment.
Charles Roper@bastianallgeier Completely agree. This is more of a paradigm shift.
Magic Blue Smoke@bastianallgeier being able to spin your own mastodon microblog feed up on your own hardware is such a trivial effort compared to 'just start your own social media network, hahaha'
the fediverse shows how fast this can grow organically
Paul Robert Lloyd 🐢@bastianallgeier Call me cynical (because I am!) but people’s expectations regarding Mastodon are getting out of hand. Will the Fediverse also herald world peace!? 😉
Scale is an anti-pattern; it’s those very network effects that cause all the issues. Twitter was groundbreaking (and an enjoyable place to socialise) when it was a niche platform, too.
The grass is always greener on the other side, but we’re still fundamentally treading the same path.
@paulrobertlloyd I should try to write an article how I mean this. The fediverse is about scaling horizontally, not vertically. The network effect will imho lead to more clients, more servers, more fediverse applications. It’s already starting. There will be the same shit here as everywhere, but there will also be peaceful islands and small fediverse villages that do their own thing. I really mean the global infrastructure aspect of it. Not the obvious problems of huge, Twitter-like instances.
Michaele Cutaya@bastianallgeier @paulrobertlloyd yes been reading and thinking about this a lot –actually little else for the past month as my growing pile of due writing shows. it's not just a new platform, it's a different way to do social media. it's harder, demands more efforts to be sure, but that's because no one is making profit from it. That it can expand and contract easily and organically is quite fascinating. to start from scratch is daunting, but it's about setting good foundations. very exciting!
Tom Anypuppies@bastianallgeier I don't know… this feels like the early web days -before- the commercialisation kicked in, and I fear that a similar gentrification effect might happen here as well. At least the decentralised structure will make this difficult. but on the other hand nonggek ppl will look for 'the' Mastodon instance and will land in meta.social or else :-)
@bastianallgeier payback.social, $brand.social… whatever online marketing rock stars might find a new playing field, once the fediverse gains more traction
@webrocker ich hab mal etwas weiter ausgeführt wie ich das so meine/sehe: https://bastianallgeier.com/notes/network-effect
ProgGrrl
foo@bastianallgeier I am very hopeful this is the case, a truly open source, truly decentralised digital town square that values human interactions. We need this as an antidote to the walled gardens and rent seeking behaviour of things like zuckerberg’s metaverse.
Zev Averbach@bastianallgeier have you seen anything compelling (aside from the dumpster bird fire) we can support/replicate to catalyze the change further?
@zev Actively moving over and abandoning Twitter is the first step. We also did that with our company account and hope that we can drag parts of the community over. I think it also really helps to support the server admins financially. Testing new Mastodon apps and giving valuable feedback is another good step. Devs with time and expertise can probably try to join https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial or other dev projects around the Fediverse as well.
David Fleetwood@bastianallgeier The questions I see are 1) how to keep the momentum going, and 2) how to invest in the rest of the fediverse so it does not become the anomaly (like Craigslist has been) and instead becomes the norm.
Robin Bairn@bastianallgeier The vulnerability I see to that is along the lines of embrace, extend, extinguish. If someone comes along and creates a popular instance with extra features and gets a large enough share of users they could gain a dominant position.
@bastianallgeier loved it! Are there any plans for Kirby to implement activitypub? Would be cool, if it was technically possible