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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon was 30k last week, over 200k now. At that rate it looks like it might reach critical mass.

I think it's awesome that someone is creating a social network that isn't another walled garden. But, will everyday consumers be able to see the value in that? For them, it's just another social network, but without the ads.

No ads and other UX improvements will hopefully translate to more nontechnical users jumping on board. Ideology isn't going to win over the masses alone.

Not only that, but value is relative. Parent commentor's assumption that !walled_garden == value is not going to be true for everyone. Some people like walled gardens. See: Apple customers.

The thing that's really going to get people on board is whether or not the people they want to follow are on there, and actually posting. If people just use things to repost the same things they post to Twitter and FB, and not engage, then that won't be much of a draw.

From what I've seen Mastodon shows an anti-capitalist message in its home page. I'm not surprised it's a left-wing echo chamber comparable to what gab.ai is for the right-wing. I don't understand why would they limit themselves to that. Many of us see the value of open source but are not anti-capitalistic, Marxist, or liberal.

Edit: I made a mistake. I saw that message in this instance: https://oulipo.social/ (the one that was popular a few days ago for not allowing you to use the letter "e") and I believed that to be the default message for a Mastodon instance. Sorry for any confusion.

Ok, I'm not on Mstodon and don't plan to be, but I am rooting for it because it is another federated instance of GNUSocial/pump.io/status.net. If you are going to criticize something [4-day old acct, ahem], at least take the time to understand it (i.e. your contribution indicates Mastodon is another-walled-garden/ mouse trap).

So, what is gab.ai's story on federation?

Each instance can have it's own spin of the network. There's a right wing instance, and there's a left wing instance. It's up to you to choose an instance, or create one yourself! Mastodon itself has such message that you're describing. The official instance is: mastodon.social. I personally chose mastodon.network.

Mastodon.social? I'm not seeing any kind of anti-capitalist message there.

The opening paragraph is marketting speak so it doesn't out and out say anything anti-capitalist, but the logical inference does try and target those that worry about multinational corporations.

"A decentralized alternative to commercial platforms, it avoids the risks of a single company monopolizing your communication. Pick a server that you trust"

It's offering an alternative to commercial platforms, trying to imply that you wanted that. It's implying that you are at risk and at the mercy of a monopoly.

Ultimately it will fail, playing on people's fears backfires. Always play to your strengths.

It's hard for new entrants because Facebook is being responsive to its users. This isn't sustainable over the long term, people at the top will change and priority will shift to short term fiscal returns.

Which social media giant do you suppose will buy/copy* them before they become too much of a threat?

* - edit

Well, mastodon is completely open source, so it's more of a question of: "Which social media giant will shamelessly copy over mastodon's code and try to beat them at their own game."

Mastodon and most other ostatus projects are free software, licensed AGPL.

This is the correct answer to OP's article title. Any social network that looks viable will be killed in its cradle* or integrated into one of the big boys.

* of course I mean acquired

This is an open source, decentralized network. It has many existential threats, but being bought out isn't one of them.

Perhaps we can convince some hedge funds to subsidize the effort while simultaneously shorting the publicly traded social networks (SNAP won't be eligible for shorting for a few months though :)?

There isn't really a "them" to buy. It's open source, and there are lots of instances. As it currently stands, if one instance sells to a company, I suspect the vast majority of people will migrate to other instances.

Indeed, I expect that a migration tool will be developed soon for exactly that reason - it's exactly the paranoia-inducing scenario that will provoke the type of person who runs an instance.

I certainly wouldn't sell my instance.

none of them. mastodon is not innovative from a UX or business model perspective, it's an explicitly derivative product meant to be like Twitter. there is already a Twitter and it is already not much of a threat to other social networks.

the innovations in mastodon are how the network is administrated and (arguably) the differences in culture that network federation creates as an alternative to a centralized platform. those innovations can't be copied or bought by a company already committed to centralized administration, which is almost certainly a compulsory thing for a for-profit business.

This is good to hear--I'd like to know more about how network federations scale when they approach things like critical mass. I hope they have mechanisms in place to safeguard against influence from centralized platforms.

There's nothing to buy... it's a bunch of servers run by individuals.

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