Twitter is not an advanced product concept. A competent team can clone it quickly. Make it easy to migrate your past tweets over, maybe some way to migrate your connections, boom.
Something like you're describing would have a better chance of succeeding given an existing network to talk to. If you want to make a Twitter clone with good import tools, it's more likely to succeed if it speaks ActivityPub and networks with Mastodon. There's probably a userbase for a product like that (but not necessarily a business model).
However, if there ever were a time when the network effect could shift enough to "cross the chasm" to public adoption, it is now (and quite literally TODAY).
People are looking for an alternative. Mastadon is the closest to achieving it. There are plenty of things I don't like about Mastadon, but unfortunately I think thats what we have. I do believe that the time is right for a clone to exist and actually gain significant adoption. As more and more prominent "influencers" (i hate that term, but its the reality) move off of Twitter and onto Mastadon, the masses will move where the influencers are. Remember that something like 95% of social media users are "lurkers". They don't create content, they only consume it. So they will move to where the creators are and if their creators are on Mastadon, then the masses will move over there.
Note: "Crossing the Chasm" is a marketing term that refers to the inflection point where early adopters and mass minority have joined a platform, and then majority mass follows. For example, when your parents started joining Facebook, that was Facebook "crossing the chasm".
They did? Mastodon is basically a full-blown clone of Twitter by a competent team.
Yes, it's also open-source and decentralized. But you can mostly ignore that most of the time, and 99% of users do so. (in much the same way that iPhones are decentralized across cell carriers, but that mostly doesn't matter to regular folks).
> Make it easy to migrate your past tweets over, maybe some way to migrate your connections, boom.
They also did this. When you need to migrate all your tweets and connections over, suddenly your really thankful Mastodon was quietly-decentralized underneath, and makes doing this mostly just a two-click operation.
That wasn't the case at least for me.
I couldn't ignore the decentralized part of the deal, because I couldn't register at mastodon.social like how I could with twitter.com. Registrations were disabled (still the same as of today) and I was told to find a server.
I guess most people would give up at that point, though I still gave their server browser a try, and couldn't find anything that looks remotely official on the first page. It seems every Mastodon instance is its own kingdom managed by people I don't know running on arbitrary rules they've set. I could build my kingdom, but of course I won't, since I wasn't interested in the decentralized bit anyway.
tl;dr for now mastodon doesn't offer an easy path to just use the service w/o thinking about its details.
Yep! This is also exactly how e-mail works, and yet everyone manages to get an e-mail account (or ten) with no problems.
> I still gave their server browser a try, and couldn't find anything that looks remotely official on the first page.
"Hello, helpdesk? I can't find the official email server. No, not Hotmail, not Yahoo, not G-mail, not Apple Me. I only want the official email server. Hello?"
> tl;dr for now mastodon doesn't offer an easy path to just use the service w/o thinking about its details.
Sure it does? Pick a free+open provider to register yourself (or ask any of your friends for an invite to their server).
It's no more effort than say, signing up for a cellphone telephone number, and everyone figured out how to do that. Children manage to handle "you have to pick a server first" when they load up Minecraft (each of which has it's own moderators and their own unique rules! -- some are even invite-only!), and the kids seem to get along just fine.
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I get your point. Being a free, open, decentralized network means there's one extra step to registration -- I agree with your complaint.
But it's literally just one extra step, and it's not even a difficult one. The idea that this makes Mastodon difficult to use because of that, seems completely farfetched -- every other popular network has had a similar step and managed to overcome it with zero issues.
The vast majority of people have their primary address in one of the following ways:
1) Their ISP gave them an email when they signed up (with handhold support) 2) Their work gave them an email when they started (with handhold support) 3) They asked a tech savvy friend who told them to use GMail instead of 1 or 2 (with some support from said tech friend) 4) They signed up for a hotmail account 20 years ago and are still using the same password
You can't just handwave away that picking a server is _hard_ for non tech people, as they don't understand the significance of their choice. Twitter for comparison, is one site with a big "sign up here" button.
Apparently the decentralized stuff does matter because Mastodon is by far the largest Twitter clone and that's its defining feature.
I can't help but analogize how some people are famous for their achievements, and some are famous for being well known.