I’m so confused!
At first @film_girl dismisses worries about defaulting to mastodon.social as “drama and virtue signaling”.
Then she says that migrating from mastodon.social to elsewhere has a big cost because you “can’t take your posts with you.”
Well, this is why mastodon.social shouldn’t be set as the default server to join: stuff like full text search aren’t supported on it, while that feature is supported on other servers.
This concern isn’t virtue signalling.
Also, we have to set out the metric for success.
Is our goal to have 100 million accounts on mastodon.social while every other server only has one account?
If that happened, I believe Mastodon would be a failure as a decentralized project.
Mastodon’s success isn’t that 11 million people use it. It’s that it’s part of a network of 24,569 nodes.
The problem is—and I can’t stress this enough—that certain people just want a Twitter replacement.
They’re not looking long term. They’re not considering future implications on network infrastructure. They’re not foreseeing that a temporary solution could potentially become permanent.
The goal here isn’t just to get everyone off Twitter, it’s to destroy Big Social.
And how to do that? Decentralize!
But if you re-centralize on one server, the Fediverse is as good as dead.
Chris Trottier
Dr Audrey Glover