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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Michal Migurski 🍉Apr 8, 2017

@andybaio This seems trivially true to me. Running Twitter is a central business decision: it’ll stay up until it’s no longer supportable, and then it will go away. Running Mastodon is a distributed hobby decision: any single holdout instance would prove your prediction, even one sitting on a long-forgotten server the same way people pull on ethernet cables to discover SMTP boxes they’ve accidentally hidden behind drywall.

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Michal Migurski 🍉Apr 8, 2017

@andybaio …more interesting is what decline will look like for Twitter. Will it be like the 6A Vox.com, like Livejournal, like Pownce, or something else? Out with a bang or a whimper?

I'm conflicted about my enjoyment of Mastodon. Twitter is very significant and important in my life, since I don't use FB or Instagram. The idea of decentralized is appealing, but I still always choose my Verizon service over my Ham license for normal communication.