@jacob I read to the bottom and saw that the previous post was also in the genre of "this thing you hope is good is bad, actually" and ... sure, I guess? Some people see failure very easily.

This writer is a pessimist. That doesn't mean they're wrong, but their agenda is definitely coming through in the writing.

@jacob Unfortunately, this post seems to hit the mark.

The lack of functional search is absolutely key as well.

@jacob I agree with most of this post, and at the same time take issue with it.

Masto/fedi has glaring issues, especially socially and culturally. We lost the trust of a lot of people, especially people of color, and we have a lot of learning to do about what happened there.

But to say that the whole thing "failed"? Come on. The fediverse is still a triumph. It's done better than almost every other attempt at creating a new social media network, commercial or otherwise, and with a fraction of the resources.

If the goal is to become as big as Twitter or Facebook then sure, we're not gonna get there. For most folks here (I think) that's not the goal at all. Has it reached enough critical mass to healthily sustain itself well into the future? Absolutely.

The UX needs to be better, and being decentralized makes that harder. And I agree that for most users decentralized in itself is not a selling point. But it's what will makes this place resilient over time. Blocking Meta's instance is absolutely rational for us who remember how Google reader killed RSS.

And the UX will get better. Contrary to the author's claims a lot of people do care about the beginner and general user experience.

In any case, a lot of justified criticism and food for thought.

@jacob I also agree 100 % with everything said here.

However, it's also true that thanks to Elon Musk and the maturity of #activitypub, this migration wave was much stronger than the previous ones. And the fact that many people stayed injected lots of energy, criticism, and engineering resources into an ecosystem that, more than anything, needed users.

Mastodon blew its opportunity. But this is not the end of the line. We can learn from past mistakes and create better systems and culture.

@jacob By now I feel just very unemotional about it, which is maybe good? It's not that bad and if the actual bad things mean I use it less, maybe that is even good 🫠😅

I observed something different which I find worse for me personally: The initial refreshing and positive everything-goes attitude has been replaced by a cynical and pessimistic grumpiness. Kind of makes me feel very at home as a German 🤷‍♂️

@jacob I don’t get it, who blew it? There’s no one in charge. That’s the whole point.

Also, many of the arguments are wrong:
- re 25% - that’s instances, not people. It’s a strength that it’s so easy to build your own that so many people experimented with it!
- selling point: is this about features? Marketing? What about: No ads?! Privacy if you like?
- decentralization: Redditors would love it. Also: the thing is interoperability.
- there’s no such thing as “the community”

@jacob The author writes some boilerplate stuff about "normal users" which is, despite not wrong, also not helpful.
Mastodon has no fancy features, this is true. It's also not sustainable for an open source project to keep the pace competing on fancy features.
Then the author goes on to complain that when you set up a new *instance*, the federated timeline is empty. What "normal user" sets up an Mastodon *instance*?

The author just wants New Twitter, well BlueSky is right there.

@jacob

I'm new to Mastodon/Fedi, I understand half of it and I can see all its problems: it's hard for newcomers and non-techies, it's hard to find communities and interesting people to follow and it's unwelcoming for racial minorities.

But this is the best shot at having a decentralized network in a long, long while, we can't give up, we need to be more aggressive in solving those problems!

Let's listen to Black people, to newcomers, to non techies, let's make this better.

@jacob I'm sorry that the overwhelming responses to this toot will be from Masto Kool-Aid drinkers. The blog post makes a lot of good points, but the one that feels like it's missing is the fact that Mastodon intentionally makes it hard to search for people and information, and that hamstrings its usefulness as a way to make connections and share. That's by design, but it's a huge drawback.

https://blog.bloonface.com/2023/06/12/why-did-the-twittermigration-fail/

@jacob The article is a fairly long read, and I don't agree with the whole thing, but so much of it is (IMHO) *exactly spot on.* Well worth several minutes of your time.

"Arch Linux approach to community building" :)

As a Nov. 2022 Twitter exile, I tried to follow the decentralization concept, and joined home.social, whose admin recently got fed up with "instance wars," and shut it down. So here I am, on mastodon.social, all my good intentions to be decentralization disciple notwithstanding.

@jacob while they’re generally correct in identifying problems with the existing fediverse, I think the broad sweeping condemnation of decentralization is overblown. The problems are technical issues; they’re not inherent to decentralization as a whole.

But just as much so, the author is great in pointing out the blind spots of advocates of decentralization—normies don’t care, and if you want to win, you have to put in more work. “Shut up and eat it” is not a recruitment strategy

@jacob I don't think the #TwitterMigration failed. Mastodon never wanted to be Twitter or Twitter-like in the first place. It's just being what it is on its own terms.

However, Spoutible is centralized like Twitter, and has been built with all the moderation tools that Twitter now lacks. When the app comes in, I think a lot of people seeking a moderated Twitter-like centralized experience will go there.