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The vast majority of users absolutely don't care about data residency or "privacy", however you interpret that word. You can convince individuals to care, but good luck convincing a large group.

What can happen (and has happened) is that the existing thing becomes just toxic enough to lessen the pull and invite alternatives. For the tech communities I've been a part of this has happened a number of times in the history of the web — off the top of my head:

• ExpertsExchange -> StackOverflow

• IE 6 -> Firefox

• Twitter -> Mastodon

In all cases the migration was driven by software engineers' disgust with the platform. The current Twitter -> Mastodon migration is mostly just folks in tech, but there are enough of us to forge decent-sized communities there.

ExpertsExchange was before my time, but was it "toxic" or was it just simply not as good?

It was significantly less useful — answers were behind a paywall.

I use "toxic" in the sense that it actively repelled users.

Wait, does Mastodon have traction?

Relative to what? It currently has ~1.2M monthly active users, or less than 0.5% of Twitter. It's probably 20x the active user base of IRC.

It has enough traction that it’s a vibrant set of communities. I use it to share bird photos, talk about adhd/autism, and follow some climate science. Its smaller than twitter, but its big enough to work now.

Which server do you recommend?

not the GP but I've been happy on fosstodon.org. It has been reliable and I've found a lot of good people to follow on it, including the founder of MNT.

I am on Aus.social as that is a relevant country for me. It’s a left leaning instance but generally relaxed aside from the usual anti nazi moderation.

I don't know anyone going over there, except for the couple people on Hackernews who keep saying it's the next big thing.

It’s not the next big thing, but it’s definitely a thing now. Lots of big names in tech post there exclusively.

Including Linus Torvalds! https://social.kernel.org/users/torvalds

At this point there is enough people on Mastodon for me to stay there without caring if its “the next big” or not.

These days I'm actually more excited to find the next small thing.

Exactly. Everybody seems to look for the place "where everyone is".

Truth is that there is none. People are always spread around many different places (and it’s a good thing).

Is everybody on Mastodon ? Absolutely not (but you would be surprised how many people never were on Twitter either).

Is there enough people on Mastodon to keep you informed, entertained and making you discover new stuff? Absolutely.

Is your niche interest represented on Mastodon? I don’t know but it might be, although with different "codes/traditions" which might make it harder to find at first glance.

Will Mastodon be the next big thing? Well, nobody on Mastodon seems to care about that question.

Is Mastodon a success? Of course it is for the thousands people using it daily.

Should I use Mastodon? Only you can answer that…

heh, yeah, I was going to say -- I don't use twitter and have used mastodon for years and do not expect it to become the next big thing.

is that important?

I put it like this. If you expect 1-to-1 mapping of your twitter social network and posts to mastodon to work before you switch, you will fail. Expecting that or something close to it is not unreasonable to want (okay, it's historically very unreasonable), but it is not what we have.

When I joined, I had one friend on the network. Then two, then I followed random people until I built a new social network organically over a year, and unfollowed people and now everything works nicely for me. I have a new social network, and all it really took was being willing to click follow and be patient.

It was slow though, or else would have been work, so I do get that this isn't a recommendation. It's honest though, and that will keep it from being the next big thing until everyone on Twitter is gone and the networks built from scratch are the place to be (and now more gentle to do that because you're a latecomer).

Next big thing though? Nah. I think it's a sustainable thing though, like Linux pre-smartphone, and one that doesn't need to be the next big thing to be big enough to hit perpetual improvement and growth until it does become closer to the big thing a few down the line..

We've got a lot of proprietary sites to crash and burn their VC funding by which point federated services are going to look like an oasis of stability where you can go back and find your friends when the trendy new network fails.

I don't know if mastodon will be a household name, but I bet it (or another federated service) outlasts bluesky, truth social, gab, reddit, twitter, instagram, youtube, tumblr, facebook, makes me wonder more at what point it's got a signal, email, dropbox, or online collaboration system somehow. I see no reason to think the network is boring enough that it will just peter out without active sabotage so far. Maybe everything will be more boring in this context in the future, that would be okay with me.

And yet, today Firefox has single-digit-percent market share, and the dominant player is in some ways worse than Microsoft was. MS seemed to want to make the web stagnate, while Google wants to turn the web into (more of) a privacy-free, advertising machine, and has been steering web standards in that direction.

Google allows Firefox to exist (by funding Mozilla via Firefox's default search engine) only so they can point to the fact that there are alternatives, with alternative rendering engines.

It is unclear if Mastodon will actually replace Twitter. I'm skeptical. I think Twitter would have to actually fail (as in, go bankrupt, or at least have such severe technical uptime/stability issues) before the platform would be abandoned enough to definitively say Mastodon won.

ExpertsExchange -> SO mainly happened because all the decent answers on EE were hidden behind a paywall.

The IE 6 to Firefox migration started about 20 years ago. The world of browsers today is _very_ different.

You may not like Google's influence, but they don't hold back technical innovation in the way that Microsoft did with IE 6. Many web designers, me included, spent hours on each project hacking around its CSS bugs and JS drawbacks. I've not had to do that with Chrome, which makes it miles better.

Honestly, I'd rather be stuck again with the restrictions IE put on us than the social destruction Google is waging on the internet.

>You may not like Google's influence, but they don't hold back technical innovation in the way that Microsoft did with IE 6.

No, the problem with Google's huge market share is that they can use their huge market share to push the web in ways that aren't standardized or in most people's best interest. They end up breaking the web.

Example: https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/04/chrome_breaks_web/

> And yet, today Firefox has single-digit-percent market share, and the dominant player is in some ways worse than Microsoft was. MS seemed to want to make the web stagnate, while Google wants to turn the web into (more of) a privacy-free, advertising machine, and has been steering web standards in that direction.

I think that reinforces GP point that consumers aren't driven by privacy. Firefox didn't take off due to privacy, it took off because IE6 was a miserable experience. The killer features that drew people to firefox were pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing and less crashes.

And even then, Firefox's decline makes the same point; Chrome didn't win because it was more private, it won because it was fast, stable (when Chrome first launched, its process isolation features were unmatched - suddenly, one tab crashing didn't mean crashing the whole browser!), and of course because Google abused its search monopoly and bundling deals to cram it down people's throats. But for all that they cheated, they could have just won fair and square because they gave people features that people actually cared about; privacy was never relevant, and security was secondary.

I honestly don't know anyone who went into Mastodon, except for probably a few people from here?

The trans community is currently the wellspring which most reliably produces top developer talent.

When trans folks saw the toxicity and hate Elon was enabling with Twitter they fucked off to Mastodon, and the barycenter of tech discussion shifted in a less Twitterly, more Mastodonish direction.

“The trans community is currently the wellspring which most reliably produces top developer talent.”

Uh is this your opinion or are there some facts that back this in any way

Almost all of the tech-adjacent people I follow on Twitter created Mastodon accounts, and about 2/3 of them stuck around.

About half the people I follow on Twitter are tech-adjacent. The other half mostly stayed on Twitter, albeit posting less than they used to.

I know a decent number of tech, some art, and a handful of others (in Social Sciences/Journalism mostly).

People treat migration as a "exodus" level event, or its a "failure" which misses the point.

IE6 wasn't "toxic". It simply was very bad and outdated. Firefox and Opera were better browsers, plus the browser doesn't really have major network effects.

While I am also not very bullish on any fedi-xyz that requires special extra effort from users, I think there's another problem with the current popular schemes that makes your (2&3) solution problematic: money incentives, over time.

Even if a company today were to offer "subscribe for no ads", I don't have especially great confidence that it will stay that way, or that the quality of the product will be maintained over time. Fundamentally, if you have a situation where making money is the goal (whether via ads or subscriptions, etc), then that is the goal that will be pursued. But a healthy community is not about money.

One way to "keep the money-grubbing company honest", as it were, is to have genuine competition. Maybe there are other good ways, but that's at least one. There needs to be an existential threat to that company, at all times, that its users (and thus revenue) could leave and go somewhere else. A federated approach at least somewhat pushes things in that direction. I'm curious to see how much traction it gains.

Maybe there could be a non-profit approach. Or maybe "online community as a public utility" approach; I really don't know. But the money-driven incentive tends to be a slow poison, I think.

Hosting your own instance isn't a requirement for joining any of the alternatives I've seen so far (e.g. Bluesky, Mastodon, Lemmy etc.) but I'm open to being corrected if you've seen this stipulated. As for the rest of this comment, it's really predicated on certain ideas about what websites have to be based on what they have been over the past 15 years. In fact it's highly possible to participate in community-run efforts that aren't driven by profit incentives, which also don't aspire to drive addiction.

There is mass attention on the pitfalls of centralization right now - Twitter, and now Reddit, two public squares annihilated by corporate greed.

People are learning that the rewards of social media are possible without the ennui machine sucking their souls. They do care, but many don't understand enough to navigate this combination of tech and social structures. Now is the time to educate them and take advantage of that.

One of the things people may have to learn is that it might not be possible (for several reasons) for privacy respecting user centric online systems to equal the ease of use and friction free on boarding of centralized silos.

There are both technical and economic reasons for this.

If people want freedom, privacy, and control of their own data they may have to tolerate a somewhat higher friction user experience. This may be unavoidable.

The cost of online freedom may be a few extra steps.

> Allowing people the choice of whether they are the product or not. "Subscribe for no ads" seems like a good middle path alternative to selling ads without demanding a whole new architecture and operational model for federated solutions.

The main problem with social media as it exists today is not advertising (as much as I despise advertising), but the toxic, addictive, engagement-at-all-costs nature of how the information is presented.

I agree with you that most people don't care about their data ownership/privacy to the point that they'll host their own instances. And if they don't do that, then they are beholden to whatever "algorithms" the centralized players want to use to ensure high levels of engagement that keep people on the site/app, and coming back to the site/app.

But it's the advertising that drives all of the stuff you do hate.

When a business is ad-driven, human attention is the raw crude that it harvests to turn into a product (ad impressions) that it then generates revenue from. The more attention it can siphon up, the more ad impressions it can deliver and the more money the business makes.

Does your coffee maker chime every twenty minutes to helpfully suggest you might want another coffee? No, of course not. Because the people who made that coffee maker already got as much money from you as they're gonna get when you bought it. As long as you're happy enough with it to not switch to the competition, they don't care how much you use it. They get no additional revenue from your additional use.

With ad-driven businesses, every user is a potentially inexhaustible source of future attention, which is what drives all of these toxic user experience choices.

They also need a better name. "Pixelfed" is not something that non-tech people will think they need.