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I'm becoming increasingly disillusioned with social media. Mastodon too. I feel as if we've moved from long form content to essentially posting single words almost. Articles -> blogs -> microblogs -> tweets. I skipped Instagram and tiktok outright but I'd put those next on that "developmental" path.

With regards to social media I feel as if we are living through the proverbial lead in gasoline phase of this particular story.

Still derive some value from forums though.

> I'm becoming increasingly disillusioned with social media.

You need cheering up, so I'll direct you to the @RyanAir twitter account. Try not to wet yourself! ;-)

Oh, for sure. To me, Mastodon scratches a certain shitposting itch that I can't quite get anywhere else, and it's frankly mostly for my benefit more than it is for others. My "feed" is mostly comprised of some bots that post useful/interesting/funny stuff, as well as a good smattering of tangentially interesting human accounts. It's almost completely garbage, but it's garbage that I have control over. I remember enjoying Twitter for a few months before it went sterile and corporate, but Mastodon sort of picks up where it left off. It's not a never-ending cesspit of "suggested" content, advertisements and politically charged conversation. It's just goofy and occasionally informative, and something I can put down after 5 minutes of use like it's a holistic digital snack.

I really don't think its your own friends who need to be convinced to use Mastodon or anything else ActivityPub.

Who needs to be convinced are the content creators.

What we really could use are content management systems that can publish directly to the open web and then be interacted with by compatible systems. CNN.com and House.gov, for example, could be host systems that provide content out to the wider Fedi.

> Who needs to be convinced are the content creators.

They've gone where the money is. So long as YouTube and Twitch write checks, people are going to make content on those platforms. They're not going to spend their own time and money (on top of content production) to host the content or run some FediVerse server.

Content creators could jump ship and run their own ads but then they've got increased costs/effort for promotion. They also aren't going to get good payouts unless they've got a huge audience that will come with them.

> Who needs to be convinced are the content creators.

People posting to Facebook and Twitter are content creators. A big reason those platforms are so popular is that they make it dirt simple to post, i.e., to create content.

> What we really could use are content management systems that can publish directly to the open web and then be interacted with by compatible systems.

We already have those: websites. CNN.com and House.gov already provide content to the entire Internet. But for the average person it's much easier to just post to FB or Twitter than fire up their own website. Also, if they post on FB and Twitter they know people will read it, whereas if they post on their own website, who knows who will read it?

> What we really could use are content management systems that can publish directly to the open web and then be interacted with by compatible systems.

That was once called RSS, RDF or Atom ...

I'm a bit more optimistic. Email is already mainstream thankfully, and newsletters are becoming more popular thanks to Substack et al, so that makes a great beach head--"nobody uses it" isn't a barrier there. If newsletters (both "regular" ones and aggregation ones, like The Sample/Refind) continue to become more popular and thus shift more content consumption over to email clients, it'll be easier in turn for reader apps to gain more users, hopefully starting a virtuous cycle.

I don't know if this model would ever become more popular than FB/Twitter/etc, but I think it could become popular enough that anyone who wants to ditch social media can do so without feeling like they're missing out on something.

Yep, network effects are hard to beat. Unless a Mastodon-esque platform is not largely a copy for existing services but rather offers something substantially different and superior (ie, how Facebook overtook MySpace, or how TikTok grew exponentially), there is very little chance of these sorts of federated platforms becoming mainstream.

Heck, I like Mastodon a lot too, but having tried I could not switch simply because the people I follow (the AI research community) is largely not present there.

Perhaps whatever competing platform comes along needs to think of how they can "embrace extend extinguish" the incumbent system. For instance maybe on Reddit, a competitor might offer something like auto-syncing a community on the new site with a subreddit.

while I agree with your overall sentiment, and yet still hope people keep working to make it wrong, no matter how hopeless it may be or appear to be.. a few more thoughts to ponder...

I know of several people who have been temp-banned by fbk, and there are certainly many more - and those folks start looking for alternatives to day it happens, and they could each bring 6 or more people with them, even if only for 30 days or so.. so "designed to retain you, no matter the cost" - may be true in regards to 'no matter the cost to users' - they seem to be spending money to over-moderate and dis-retain some.

Also I believe one of the six bills up in congress about reigning in tech overpower, has mentions of making data more portable.. I saw something where fbk made it so you can export your posts to wordpress.. as preemptive as that may be - it does not make it a thing to pull your groups info, marketplace stuff.. and it's possible we could have legislative action to make it easier to mirror stuff from the giants to other portals - this would make it much easier to transfer regular use off their platforms..

It's interesting you mention influencers - that can be a big piece of the puzzle with outsized network effects - one reasons I keep kicking the idea of having 'theUnbanned' or uncensored.. ungagged - something better sounding.. or something as a gateway to the fediverse.. it's not unusual to see popular people kicked form platforms and it shouldn't be too hard to take advantage of that with an easy to spin up new network for them.. I've seen more than a dozen opportunities from twitch in the past so many months..

>feel like they've got more stake in the platform; you follow celebrities to stay 'in' on the gossip, you follow smart people in some faux investment of intellectual capital, and you follow successful people because you think that basking in the starlight will impart something valuable to you.

Wouldn't a twitter bridge fix this? Then people could just fellow these people on mastodon or whatever

What's worthwhile about the mainstream social networks? The only ones I can tolerate are Reddit and FB (solely because of its calendar features). Instagram and Twitter having more users means nothing to me because I do not care about those people.