Mike Masnick ✅Dec 21, 2022
I wrote about how I cannot understand why anyone is interested in joining a new centralized social media platform when we now have a great opportunity to move to protocols instead of platforms. https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/21/why-would-anyone-use-another-centralized-social-media-service-after-this/
Why Would Anyone Use Another Centralized Social Media Service After This?

So, it’s been quite a year for legacy, centralized social media — and all without any really big change to the laws that govern it (yet — the EU’s are coming into force shortly, but pos…

Techdirt
Show threadMichaelDec 21, 2022

@mmasnick personally still expect that re-centralisation will ultimately occur, as it did with email, which is now dominated by a small number of big players, with self hosting almost impossible these days.

I did find these arguments quite compelling:

https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2022/11/14/scaling-mastodon/

Hoping I’m wrong though.

Scaling Mastodon is Impossible

Now that Twitter is dying, what can replace it?

Show threadPekka LundDec 22, 2022

@michael @mmasnick
Good points and there are further issues for Mastodon to become true alternative for Twitter.

Lack of proper search of content, even on the protocol level, is one big problem. It more or less eliminates most of the use cases I use Twitter for.

It would be pretty hard to implement now so that it would scale and work with federation with minimal delays that Twitter provides.

Also it's just big waste of collaborative effort if all content produced here isn't searchable later.

Show threadMichael
@pekka @mmasnick I don’t know. I think the lack of search makes mastodon much more conversational in nature. Which is a good thing.
Dec 22, 2022 at 7:24amWeb
Show threadPekka LundDec 22, 2022

@michael @mmasnick
It just means even that use case is missing essential functionality.

Having search doesn't force to use it, it doesn't take anything away. I can have just the same kind of conversations on Twitter but there I and others are able to find it later by remembering what others said or by using keywords of interest.

Here conversations do not really contribute to the extremely useful shared knowledge base searchable web is.