Mastodawn

Andy Baio Apr 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?

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Colin Mahns

@andybaio @munin don't think you are wrong at all. i think however that this will remain a niche thing for tech savvy users and nothing more. irc networks for example are still widely popular with tech types but have no love outside this group in the mainstream, for legitimate reasons.

the decentralized floss protocols tend to be counter intuitive to modern users, preventing adoption. it'll be nice knowing this network will have a life of its own though :)