Mastodon Is Doomed | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon Is Doomed

justingarrison.com

There's one of these posts every month, and predictably the author dunks on Mastodon for not having a monetisation strategy.

That is a good thing. Keep your VC-powered enshittification[0] away from us, please.

> All of the 3rd party integrations are happening with ActivityPub, not Mastodon

That's like saying the web is doomed because all of the integrations are happening with HTTP and not Google Chrome. Yeah, that's the point. That's where integrations are supposed to happen, using the standardised protocol.

[0] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

[OP] I wrote the article because putting the time and financial burden of operating large distributed networks on individuals is not maintainable. The fact that the parent company has no plans to change that except to make it more expensive and complicated for individuals (switching to Kubernetes) is why I think it will fail to reach its intended goals.

The example I gave was email. Lots of things integrate with email at a protocol level but Gmail won because 1) it had better features 2) lots of things integrated with it directly

Would you build an IMAP/SMTP/POP3 product today? ActivityPub support will end up being a checkbox or buried setting.

Strange that you use a still-popular, decentralized, open-standard global service with a myriad of paid and free providers, for which there exists dozens of open-source clients and servers across the planet, all of which integrate with each other... as a model for why Mastodon won't work.

Why do you say "gmail won"? Did gmail switch to a proprietary, closed protocol? Did they lose compatibility with even the smallest, independent email servers? (That was rhetorical-- provided those smaller servers adopt appropriate open, non-proprietary anti-spam measures (DMARC, SPF, DKIM, etc), they work fine.)

Meanwhile, no one uses AOL's old proprietary mail system, if it exists any more.

> Lots of things integrate with email at a protocol level but Gmail won because (...)

What are you talking about? I spend all day every day sending and receiving emails from all sorts of services, and Gmail is not it. What exactly is your definition of "won"?

I’d guess he’s referring to the most common use of the phrase and means market share. And yes, gmail won

> I’d guess he’s referring to the most common use of the phrase and means market share.

That makes no sense at all. Are you actually trying to argue that your perceived popularity of an email provider is proof that email is dead? While actually referring to the popularity of email as a whole?

> And yes, gmail won

According to some sources, Gmail has a 36% market share of email. This means that the remaining 64% share is not held by Gmail. Do you look at this and think that email as an open federated non-centralized service is doomed? Absolutely ridiculous.

Bittorrent, multiple file sharing protocols, and other distributed peer-to-peer systems and are doing very well.

Email lost because spam is an extremely difficult problem and because large email providers decided to become an oligopoly and shut off smaller providers.

Email lost? What do you mean by lost? Email is still here some 50+ years since its invention and it’s used everywhere across the globe.

The point is it lost because Joe and Jane doesn't want to spin up their own email server even though they can.

But even if they did, once Gmail and Outlook block them in their spam filters they have just been de-federated from the billions of accounts to send emails to, let alone fight the mountains of spam going on in email.

So the biggest providers have won and email, with centralization.

Perhaps the solution is to let go of the idea that Mastodon should be free of charge? Communities that have created organizations with budgets could use those to provide Mastodon as a service to their users. Other instances could charge a few bucks a year and solve all of their financial issues. Perhaps sponsorship could also cover costs.

The decoder interview touched on that and he said they have no plans for that model. Right now all of the larger instances have a variety of ways to get donations. I agree it would be better if it were integrated into the app to make it easier to find for users and track for admins.

Forums have existed for decades and are doing fine.

None of the problems this post mentions are fundamentally insurmountable, as evidenced by the fact that large peer-to-peer online communities have existed since the beginning of the internet.

I don't disagree. Forums is a great example although each one is an island of information for specific communities.

Do you have any stats about if forums are growing in users? I used them for decades, but can't remember the last time I used one unless you count stack overflow (the gmail of forums)

but it isn't an island, because there is a global search index, allowing you to access information from each of them at will.

certain hobby forums are still central (i personally use them for my poultry, aquatics and ttrpgs hobby) - they remain dominant because these communities depend on a way to search historical data instead of reading an algorithm based flow stream with the same 10 questions every day.

unfortunately there is a large push of the younger generation who didn't grow up with forums to try and retool the concept of traditional forum activity on platforms that don't support it, most popular being discord (of all things?!), and facebook groups (just, why?). but as neither of these platforms support a search index outside of their walled gardens and encourage a spammy "flow" with peak interactions that slowly chokes any quality information, the future is pretty fucked on data if the teens don't move to classic software.

so imo, mastodon's traditional design with a modern face, together with the fediverse, has the potential to replace current commercial behemoths, and if it does, the internet might be saved. but if mastodon goes commercial, and find itself with a walled garden to generate more profits, there is little hope for the future.

just look at modern chat clients. there is a reason you can't talk to grandma's facebook account through your google chat anymore, and it isn't for your benefit.

the world used to be hell of a lot more connected and quality information used to be hell of a lot more accessible. but commercialization, SEO, and so on, is currently keeping -the internet- on life support. so a handful of people can play billionaires.

> Do you have any stats

I mean, do you? In the article you make a lot of very bold statements but you give very little citations.

The my ideal fediverse product is one that is simple and runs on RSS.

Is there such a project?

There were a few posts in the past that were focused on RSS based social media.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33975082

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28645871

Most of them focus heavily on consumption and redistribution. It still requires you to own a source of truth (eg blog) but none of them solve the interaction problems (eg how to leave a comment or have a conversation)

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