Mastodon will not be the next Twitter, for many reasons. It doesn't scale. A influx of some tens of thousands of users already breaks half the fediverse. Absor

Mastodon will not be the next Twitter, for many reasons. It doesn't scale. A influx of some tens of thousands of users already breaks half the fediverse. Absorbing this relatively small growth means an instance owner has to reach deeply into their pocket to pay for extra hardware capacity. And sees their manual moderation workload explode. In between this scaling, the system will simply be dysfunctional or locked down. It all runs on donations and volunteer work. This is much different from Twitter where as a user you're never confronted with scaling or funding problems. Nor would you easily face the situation that all your content is wiped out because the instance owner retired. Or because a mod doesn't like you. Because moderation is completely arbitrary, Reddit-style. An instance owner may also decide to not federate with specific other servers that you liked, destroying your cross-instance posting and following. You could scale by making lots of instances, but people need to actually fund and run them. And it makes all of the above issues even worse. The culture clash is perhaps most interesting to see, as the author correctly lays out. The author uses the word "traumatic" when confronted with an abundance of follow requests. That sentence succinctly summarizes the typical culture. The fact that it's a request, requiring permission. And a type of extreme fragility that is opposite to Twitter's culture. Although policies vary between instances, most are designed for safety to the point that conversation becomes dysfunctional. One large instance stated to not post food, insects, and a whole list of highly generic items without a content warning (CW). Because apparently, somebody might be triggered by those. A user questioning this policy was soon circled and explained that it only takes seconds to do, whilst the "trauma" lasts for days. Extreme safety leading to unsafety in expressing the simplest of sentences. It's a clash of two extremes. Extreme toxicity and extreme fragility. The other limiting factor is the rejection of America's culture war. Don't be political or overly political, and especially not regarding the topics dominating US politics. Here the mismatch cannot be larger. Twitter basically IS the US culture war as of 2016 when Trumpism brought Twitter back from a coma. Twitter users have been exposed to this extreme polarization for 6 years, they've internalized and normalized it. And now they're asked to shut up about it and to not cause any stirs. The result, a perfectly happy and peaceful place is disturbingly unsatisfactory, I care to admit. Nothing happens. There's no enemy to bash, no drama, nothing to be outraged about. It's like watching the news where the reporter says: all is good today, carry on. Or watching a movie where nothing happens to any character. How many online "friendships" and communities survive without a common enemy? And if it survives, why use Mastodon, when you might as well open a Reddit community or Discord server?