Ev WilliamsWho has a perspective on the future of Mastodon? Where is it going? Where should it go? Either off-the-cuff opinions or pointers to articles are appreciated.
Alex S.@ev The fundamental issue I see repeatedly is that Interoperability (what Mastodon and Fedi truly offers) is a no-brainer for tech-types but completely uninteresting and in some-cases a turn off for laypeople. Creates a huge adoption issue.
@ev I’ve had conversations with people that go “I don’t care that other people can follow me from other servers - I want all my friends to be on the same server as me. Why would I just want some person to be running my server anyways?”
@ev I was collecting tweets about this for a blog post I was planning to write about this phenomenon. I find it fascinating people find Mastodon "too complicated", because I think it's truly as streamlined as it gets for a Fediverse onboarding tool.
@ev What this means in the long term is that it will remain the alt-network that it had been since day one, and I think that's totally okay. I do think it's a shame more people aren't just accidentally adopting an interoperable system
@ev If people were more willing to jump onto Mastodon, I think it'd change the level-of-standards people would have for the other social networks they use. Doctrow writes about this concept a bit.
https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy
https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy
Privacy Without Monopoly: Data Protection and Interoperability
Update, June 11, 2021: Today, we updated this paper with a new appendix, "The GDPR, Privacy and Monopoly," which analyzes the legal benefits of interoperability under the GDPR, where a regional privacy law creates a sturdy privacy backstop for interoperability remedies. This appendix is also...
@ev I think there's fundamentally two "queues" of people using social media - ones who like their feeds to "stop" - i.e. run out of content once they've caught up with their friends posts - and ones who want a never-ending river of content.