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Seems to me the biggest challenge for Mastodon is that the most high profile Twitter users explicitly want the centralisation it provides. They are going there
by zmmmmm 4y ago
Seems to me the biggest challenge for Mastodon is that the most high profile Twitter users explicitly want the centralisation it provides. They are going there literally to get on a sandbox and propagate their messages to as many millions of followers as they can. They will not understand the theoretical possibility of federation - they will see anything that introduces any kind of barrier or complexity in the way of them reaching their audience as an antifeature.
I think Mastodon, or whatever else tries to follow it, needs to bury the federation aspect as a technical detail and design from the ground up something that emphasises a unified system. It's not that easy when probably a large fraction of the people building it are introverted engineers who have difficulty even comprehending how someone can want to interact with hundreds let alone thousands or millions of other people. But as long as the fundamental concept of the system is in contention with what the core user base wants, it's hard to think how it will be very successful, at least at replacing a service like Twitter.
EDIT: speling
- rolenthedeep 4y agoMastodon isn't trying to replace Twitter.
- zmmmmm 4y agoyes .... good point - which makes it all the more unlikely to succeed in meeting people's expectations.
- lucideer 4y agoI don't want to be too confrontational / personal but your comment contains hubris at levels I've rarely seen & it's something I think may be worth reflecting on. The worst offender: > probably a large fraction of the people building it are introverted engineers who have difficulty even comprehending how someone can want to interact At least this starts with "probably", admitting some level of uncertainty, but the overall tone shows a derision & contempt for a group of people you've almost certainly (ironically) never interacted with. I guarantee the developers behind Mastodon understand how people want to interact much better than you do; they're highly intelligent & have actively engaged on the problems around human interaction for years. This is not a system that's been created in a vacuum. > the most high profile Twitter users explicitly want > They are going there literally to get > They will not understand > they will see You've made a lot of very confident statements here about what these high profile people want and will do: I'm not seeing a lot of data to back that up. Regardless, even if there are a subset of people who do want that: what makes them high profile? Mostly it's the platform they're on. If they don't gain a high profile on Mastodon, it's not Mastodon's loss, it's theirs. All Mastodon needs to do is serve the needs of a critical quorum in aggregate, not the needs of a specific supposedly-influential few users. All-in-all, the main reason people favour centralisation is habit. In reality, even on e.g. Facebook you see communities developing within its "groups" feature, as a parallel to what Mastodon is fundamentally designed around.