And I guess I'd argue: there actually aren't that many phpBB communities, relative to the numbers of people on Twitter and FB.
If Mastodon (or federation in general) was going to "work" we'd see no FB and tons more phpBB type implementations.
Meanwhile, people continue to seek out communities that do represent the types of interactions people want. I’d say it’s succeeding as much as facebook is.
Maybe I'm defining succeeding too narrowly, and sorry to be rude, but what universe do you live in where this is even close to true? Some quick googling shows the network hadn't even cracked 100k users in Feb: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/99469840739197657
> FB is essentially a growth engine designed to drive MAU numbers as high as possible
Right, and it does that by providing a better (a matter of taste, perhaps), cheaper product than Mastodon via specialization of labor, and through network effects, both of which depend on centralization.
If you just want to refer to smaller, more specialized or niche communities instead of mass appeal, then just say that.
But I'm measuring success by people going out of their way to visit the site--something facebook does not provide. Half the sites on the internet link to it.
> Right, and it does that by providing a better (a matter of taste, perhaps), cheaper product than Mastodon via specialization of labor, and through network effects, both of which depend on centralization.
I can't elect my moderation style on facebook.... so it's not at all equivalent. Centralization is central to why facebook isn't going to be a general purpose forum of use to anyone.
I do not consider lack of competing with fbooks numbers as not successful. Unless you are strictly speaking about wall street monetization desires, success of mastodon or other systems to me is whether or not they provide a service that is valuable to those who use it.
Firechat, signal and others may never match the numbers posted by fbook, yet those people who have been able to communicate and share in places without worrying about their messages being stopped by different groups of censors, or worse - these tools are immensely successful, even if they have only helped hundreds or thousands of people and not billions served.
Just because many people are addicted to fbook with thier centralized how to keep them hooked / addiction specialists does not mean it is providing a better product.
Specialization of labor and network effects can be backed into other open source things. The growth of one click installs at places like Digital Ocean is the beginning of this trend imho.
If fbook was the perfect vessel for sharing then phub, whatevertorrent, vpns, and similar would not exist much less be popular.
Has anyone started a MAU chart showing how many users communiques have been shared with govts around the world? Anyone have a tally on the number of arrests in the phillipines (and others) and kills in malaysia (and others) that have been enabled by fbook?
I've people promote fbook as free and state as "fact" that users won't pay for self hosted or moderated solutions.
Fbook is not free, it has many costs.
As some of these alternatives mature, I believe we will see more and more people using them more often. Some paying with cash, some paying with drive space / cycles donated, some paying by giving thanks to friends of family who are allowing them to use slices of their systems.
Mastodon is not better for Kim K, and likely will never be, what is better or not is relative to many factors and that is going to be different for different people / groups.