Andy BaioApr 7, 2017

Prediction: Mastodon will likely outlast Twitter.

Historically, decentralized, open-source platforms and protocols with any adoption run forever, even if they rarely reach the popularity or cultural relevance of centralized platforms.

It seems likely to me that when Twitter eventually shuts down, people will still be running Mastodon instances.

Did you know Diaspora has 328 active nodes and 17k users? Hell, there are 3,652 active FidoNet nodes, and that started in 1984!

So... am I wrong?

Show threadDanny O'BApr 7, 2017
@andybaio yeah, I remember writing about Bitcoin for the first time, and realising that I was hitting the same failure of my own imagination -- I could not imagine them succeeding with the ambition levels of some people involved, but at the same time I couldn't actually define what "failure" would look like, because I couldn't imagine absolute extinction
Show threadParker HigginsApr 7, 2017
@mala @andybaio We're so used to thinking of tech platforms/protocols as having a SPOF when a corporate entity shuts down, but I think that's really the exception now. Nothing ever goes through "absolute extinction", for the most part
Show threadDanny O'B
@xor @andybaio I think this is what Kevin Kelly (PBUH) was talking about when he said that technologies never die
Apr 7, 2017 at 11:14pmWeb