>The idea of Mastodon is good but it's too annoying to use, and that will torpedo any hope for wide use. If by "the idea of Mastodon" you mean "you can connect

>The idea of Mastodon is good but it's too annoying to use, and that will torpedo any hope for wide use. If by "the idea of Mastodon" you mean "you can connect to isolated versions of Twitter and view it with whatever client you want, but users maintain an account for every instance", then Mastodon is great. The majority of people who use Mastodon use it in this way, and it's reportedly excellent. The two largest instances are identical in purpose, to the point that their userbase doesn't see their sharing of identities to be a liability, and it's functionally irrelevant to their social graph- their "usernames" are a combination of their Twitter handles and their contributions don't vanish if banned. Novel content is widespread, because the posters are all artists. However, if by "the idea of Mastodon" you mean "you can have a unified identity, but server admins have the final say in which instances that identity is allowed to talk to and can fragment it at will", then Mastodon is over-complicated, unstable, and hostile. The majority of articles featuring Mastodon emphasize this as a feature (well, that and the custom client thing), but "small groups of people whose only common trait is that they like custom Twitter clients" is not predictive of post quality or quantity, and the fungibility of one's post means coming into conflict with an unstable platform is just that much worse (you can follow a timeline of usernames in art if/as they change simply due to style, something that's not true for hot takes or even semi-long-form text posts like this, so if your instance turns hostile the only thing you have is your username... which can trivially be taken from you. And I think it's this latter group for which Twitter will continue to have the edge simply because there, usernames are unique, and all notable people post there anyway simply due to audience size. You don't have to worry that your social graph is going to get split in half (and your posts effectively banned from half the network that can see them by default) overnight; stability like that is valuable.