Mastodawn

jacobian Jun 15, 2023

“Mastodon had its chance and it blew it”

I couldn’t agree with this post more. I had super high hopes, but I’m pretty convinced now that between the technical and social issues there’s not a good chance of mastodon being anything other than a tiny niche.

I’m unlikely to go back to Twitter, and BlueSky seems unlikely to be a place I wanna hang out, so I guess this is still home for me for now. But I’m pretty sad things here aren’t going in a different direction.

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

Why did the #TwitterMigration fail? – Café Lob-On

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Ben Jun 15, 2023

@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”

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Alon

@b3n @jacob Re ads: they're a nice feature, but the Mastodon userbase is generally technically adept enough to be browsing the commercial web with ad blockers anyway. I don't really see ads on my desktop when I go on YouTube or when I used Birdsite. An ad-free environment for people who are less technical is precious, due to the problem @pluralistic complains about re scams and enshittification, but then the UI and onboarding need to be friendly to such users.