> Glad Mastadon is doing its thing being like the IRC of twitter or whatever, but there's absolutely no way it ever truly competes
A good thing about open source software is that any kinks can be fleshed out over time through contributions and forks.
Think about how many non-technical people run WordPress blogs on the internet.
Until journalists, politicians, musicians, artists, and brands can have their posts go viral into the feeds of tens of millions of (unwilling) users, it doesn't replace what makes Twitter valuable.
Excluding or severely limiting virality is the essential criterion for any Twitter replacement.
That said, though I like and use Mastodon (as I do Linux), it is just not going to get Twitter-scale mass adoption. It is not, and believing to the contrary is just obvious delusion.
Maybe post.news will. It's worth a try. But if it doesn't attenuate virality, it won't improve on Twitter enough to be worth the trouble.
The successor to Twitter has an advantage that Twitter didn't have, which is an existing social graph ready to migrate. If a critical mass of the Twitter graph moves to Mastodon, and the interface and experience can be made as simple as Twitter, it has a chance.