i am seeing a whole lot of criticisms of mastodon that, to me, sound like “social networking sites have always been bad, therefore mastodon must also be bad.” surely we can muster a little more optimism than that.
i just posted my own “come to jesus” moment.
Most people don't want to link their online persona to instances with stupid names and very strange rules. So they all flock to the more generalist ones which are few and far between and have an established user base and reputation. Since generalist instances are not "cool" to administer, only a few dedicated people maintain them and they will keep being few and grow larger and larger
i happened to find a “generalist” mastodon instance without really trying. i just read a few twitter ex-pats for awhile, to get the lay of the land, and picked one. i sent an email to the administrator, offering to donate some money, because i couldn’t find a donation link. if this one doesn’t work out, i’ll pick a different one. or run one myself!
again: your criticism sounds to me like “social media has never worked, therefore mastodon also can’t work.” i choose to believe that there is something beyond the status quo.
> your criticism sounds to me like “social media has never worked"
There is an entire paragraph where I explain exactly what functionality could be added to Mastodon to at least make it possible to be better. In its current state I believe it's bound to develop this behavior with no way to fix it
He figured this is due to not being listed properly on some of the onboarding pages. He had tried to get on it, but failed. He then continued to collect some stats on all instances (which is difficult) and came to the conclusion that 90% of Mastodon instances have < 10 users, and most are closed/private.
If true, then yes...users will flock to a small group of large instances. Which makes sense, you want to go to where the most people are, it's the entire point of a social network.
If exponential growth continues (which I doubt), it will lead to existential problems. In costs, moderation, compliance, etc.
- older than 3 years or more than 10M€/year of revenue
- 5 million unique visitors per month
Name one social media site and then explain how it was a net positive for society/outweighed all of it's toxic aspects.
That isn't something one can objectively measure.
in that respect, federation is the answer. take the power away from anybody who could screw it all up for us.
No dark-cryptic algorithms, promoted creativity in coding, design and music. You knew the people you added. Made socialising easier.