Why Did the #TwitterMigration Fail?

Of course it failed. Predictably [0] and unsurprisingly.

Even went Twitter went down, its users would rather wait for it to get back up than to switch around to use something even worse. The loud crickets screaming about 'migrating' were just the techies that pretended that it was the end of times and the rest of the world did not care.

If you really want to know the main reason why this 'migration' failed read everything under:

> "Decentralisation makes the user experience worse"

The moment you tell users to 'Choose an instance' the whole so-called 'migration' failed and normal users just went back to Twitter. If they cannot sign up in less than a minute then they will give up and move back. Even the Mastodon developers knew this user experience failure of finding an instance.

So the Mastodon team crowned Mastodon.social as the default [1] in their mobile app, meaning that it just become the largest and most centralized instance which is a federation failure.

This is not early days anymore for Mastodon and it is almost 8 years of it existing. We have given it plenty of time for it to be an alternative to Twitter which that had well over 50 million users in less than 8 years.

It had it's chance in November and it failed spectacularly after 6 months of this observation since they forgot about what the meaning of the 'network effect' and how strong Twitter's network effect still is with 220M+ daily active users.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34049029

[1] https://mstdn.social/@feditips/110233282251253677

Closed and proprietary protocoles/software, centralization, and vendor lock-in keeping way too many users hostage of the platform. And then networking effects do their thing and prevent users liberating themselves.