reading a bunch of comments about Mastodon on tech news sites about how it "will never succeed" or will go extinct. Problem is, that defines Mastodon's success in the metrics of Silicon Valley VC. The point of Mastodon does not appear to be a growth -> exit -> brand vehicle strategy that Twitter has been struggling with.
I'm having a good time here. Isn't that success enough?
@PolymerWitch This is a Good Toot.
(Every post about "is this doomed to be the next Ello"—not individually, but cumulatively—sets my teeth on edge. Because, no? It's a basement operation to make GNU Social more accessible to folks who've felt burned by Twitter? In that regard it's gloriously successful? More successful than Jabber in the early '00s?)
I think I tooted about this two months ago (and I may well have articulated it better back then), but here goes aaagain:
To reiterate @sinders's "bar analogy" (there's a NowThis video, but I can't find it!): In any given real-world "public space," we still tend to have discrete, semi-private discussions, as well as one-on-one conversations. In the real world, millions of people are not all simultaneously privy to the animated conversation you might be having with friends in a restaurant booth.
The purpose and worth of the "bar analogy" is to help a layperson visualize real-world interactions; simply by making online interactions more like "real-world" ones, we can mitigate some (not all, obvs) of the opportunities for harassment or other social clashes.
Mastodon is *already* a huge success, if it's interpreted as a ground-up realization, a proof-of-concept of @sinders's "bar analogy."
And although granular privacy settings for each individual "toot" is not necessarily the draw for every user here (yet!), the larger theory about simulating real-world -type interactions has already been considered, is already baked in.
Twitter could almost certainly never implement the same exacting privacy controls—they'd probably have to rebuild the platform completely—but also, they wouldn't WANT to implement those settings...!
Twitter worked for so long for so many people, and then stopped "working," precisely *because* it's predicated on "let's shove millions of people into the same room and let them jockey for space and presence." The platform doesn't necessarily WANT the average user to switch their account to "private" and be removed from certain interactions or conversations.
So early questions like "Will Mastodon last?" seem misguided?? It doesn't have to "last." It just needs to prove granular privacy works
Actually, I guess the Mashable article hit this point early, well, and in a single sentence—"Individual toots can be marked as private, meaning you don't have to choose between a public or a private account like on Twitter."
I hated having to make that choice, but a public Twitter account—which had once been crucial for making professional contacts—had become totally unusable to me. But as a "locked" account (with 25k followers!), I could no longer contribute to public convos with "strangers"
OLD ACCOUNT
Jenn Frank