Creating the network effect was the greatest loss we had in the 21st century. We used to be able to use XMPP to talk to Google Hangouts, Facebook Messenger and all sorts, and they took it away, just so you'd have to use their shitty little program instead.
We can disagree about what counts as good enough for the mass market in the modern era, whether normal people will actually use this vs whether normal people used XMPP's interop in 2005, and quibble about feature sets (video calls weren't initially supported in '05, and most bridges don't support them today), but for chatting with friends, you still only need one app - and because Matrix is an open standard, you can even change which app you want it to be.
Post script: I look forward to hearing about how terrible Matrix was, last time someone tried the (over-crowded) default server 12-18 months ago. The software dev community here will follow up and say that software cannot have gotten better since then, either.
From a limited set of options.
My friends are the mass market. You and I are savvy, tech folks and we know what Matrix is. I've got friends who work as car mechanics, secretaries, teachers, etc. They're not dumb, they can spend the time to figure out which app will work best for them on their computers and phones, but they don't particularly want to spend their time fiddling with software on their computer. I love them, and they love me, but do they love me enough to go through this rigamarole just to share Star Trek memes and talk about our days?
For all its faults, Discord is easy, and it's good. They've put in a lot of polish, and it just works, and it's well supported. Convincing them to move away means that at best, I'm taking on the role of tech support for... potentially dozens of people? Except it won't be that many, because I doubt that many of them will move.
Discord will have to get catastrophically bad before they strongly consider moving off of it, and I would bet you twenty US dollary-doos that the first place we'll move to will be Slack.
Network effects, man.
I'm not on mastodon but I've perused some threads and if it brings value to people great - the fact that it was there when twitter imploded means some portion of the population actually moved to it and now uses it. It provided some real value to people.
Kind of, but in the past. It isn't good for today's web, otherwise we wouldn't be in this discussion.
Now the new challenge is to figure out how to put those dogs down.
This always happens.