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The author doesn't seem to realize that it's not necessary for Mastodon to reach the same scale as Twitter or Facebook. We might be headed for a more pluralisti
by turnsout 4y ago
The author doesn't seem to realize that it's not necessary for Mastodon to reach the same scale as Twitter or Facebook. We might be headed for a more pluralistic future, with a large chunk of people on Mastodon, another big community on Bluesky, etc.
We're all so steeped in the recent past of monolithic centralized social media platforms, but if we peek over our recency bias, we can see that it wasn't always that way.
- amadeuspagel 4y agoIt wasn't always this way because it was never technologically possible.
- dustymcp 4y agoi liked forums alot better for specialized content, i have no interest in the cesspools of unoriginal content that is social media.
- tsimionescu 4y agoBut the whole appeal of social networks is that everyone is there. No one likes to check 20 different apps to talk to 20 slightly different groups of people, or to follow 20 different celebrities they like. There's never really going to be such a thing as a thriving small social network.
- textfiles 4y agoAdmin/Veteran of small social networks over the last 30 years here. Yes there are.
- turnsout 4y agoDefinitely—there are so many thriving fora that were around before Facebook, and will be full of activity long after Meta has been delisted.
- femiagbabiaka 4y agoThere’s this thing called IRC…
- xoac 4y agoNope it's a side-effect of the current business model which is to monetize attention at the biggest scale possible.
- outime 4y agoIt may be the whole appeal for you but for others it's a deterrent.
- eropple 4y ago> There's never really going to be such a thing as a thriving small social network. Just because you're not on them doesn't mean they don't exist. I wouldn't namedrop the ones I like here because I like them the way they are, but consider: there are so many 100-200 member Discords with consistent and vibrant communities. They're not trying to become hypermassive cash engines, but that's okay and even good. That's a grim way to exist.
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago> there are so many 100-200 member Discords with consistent and vibrant communities Slack has a free tier too. 90-days of history only, is as much a feature as it is a bug. Idle "off-the record" talk with current and/or ex colleagues in a bar after work isn't recorded indefinitely, why should the online equivalent?
- beardog 4y agoTo have actual off the record, you need disappearing messages (and trust for your colleagues) like in Signal. Not simply paywalled messages.
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y agoOh sure, the message history past 90 days is safe only from casual inquiry, not a determined adversary. it's like the first kind of cryptography not the second (1) I'll take suggestions for a better (easy, cheap or free, functional, familiar) small community platform? 1) https://libquotes.com/bruce-schneier/quote/lbx8x8g https://libquotes.com/bruce-schneier/quote/lbx8x8g
- eropple 4y agoIt isn't "90 days of history". It's 90 days of history you can see. Slack retains it indefinitely.
- cal85 4y agoI know the small ones exist, and I use many, they’re often much better than Twitter for specialist interests (HN is just one example). But I also scroll through Twitter daily, for something the small ones can’t provide: it’s the big one where ‘everyone’ is.
- krapp 4y agoYou're literally describing the way forums, messageboards, mailing lists and everything worked before Twitter and Facebook came along. Yes, people can and will handle more than the absolute minimum social complexity just fine. And Mastodon in particular will let you follow people on whatever instance you happen to use. "Checking 20 different apps to talk to 20 slightly different groups of people" is hyperbole, not reality.
- jghn 4y ago> You're literally describing the way forums, messageboards, mailing lists and everything worked before Twitter and Facebook came along Yes. And while the GP was hyberbolic, I think what we saw is that a large %age of people preferred one stop shopping. Speaking for myself, the thing I love(d) the most about Twitter was the consolidation. It effectively replaced a bunch of message boards, online sites, and other things I would check throughout the day. One site gave me banter with friends, talking shop with professional acquaintances, weather, news, gossip, etc.
- Dma54rhs 4y agoThe people who were first online didn't represent the average person. Everyone's online now, it used to be a bunch of geeks and weirdos back then. I'm nostalgic as well but the times have changed.
- giantrobot 4y agoThis is very ahistorical. There's long been consumer non-geek friendly online services. The typical AOL user in the 90s wasn't a geek by any means. They used chat rooms, instant messaging, and mailing lists via the user friendly AOL interface. Facebook has long provided a user-friendly interface for non-geek users. It's filled with non-geeks generating content. While the Internet has always had a geek contingent it hasn't been the exclusive domain of geeks for nearly thirty years.
- jvanderbot 4y agoI talk to my close friends by text, discord, and steam chat. I talk to my coworkers by LinkedIn and slack. I talk to my family by phone, email, and text. Some are on signal some are not. It's quite normal.
- IanCal 4y ago> There's never really going to be such a thing as a thriving small social network. Fun to see this posted on a pretty niche but very active site which covers probably a small proportion of your social circle.
- stcroixx 4y agoMany people want just that, but there is likely no overlap between them and someone following celebrities on social media.
- maeln 4y agoMaybe for the recent idea of social network. But back in the 2000', a lot of "social network" were IRC server/channel and forums. And they were often small and meant for a specific community/hobby/interest. The idea of a social network where almost all of your friend and family are on, is really something that started in the 2020'. In many way, Mastodon is just the phpBB of the 2020', with the added benefit that you could connect to other phpBB instances. And even though hosting your own phpBB instance or IRC/TeamSpeak/Mumble server kinda fell out of favor due to Reddit and Discord, they also kind of act in the same way. Sure you have one login to access all the community instead of having to have a separate account for each, but each community are their own bubble and can moderate however they like. It is not a "worlwide forum" like twitter or instagram.
- tsimionescu 4y agoYou're speaking of a time when the Internet itself wasn't really thriving - it was barely a curiosity that didn't exist in the lives of the vast majority of people in the world in any way at all. With all of their downsides, it's only huge social networks that actually brought the vast majority of people to the internet at all.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago> You're speaking of a time when the Internet itself wasn't really thriving - it was barely a curiosity that didn't exist in the lives of the vast majority of people in the world in any way at all. It was thriving for me, and I was barely a teenager at the time.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y agoMany of us software devs are a different sort.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago> But back in the 2000', a lot of "social network" were IRC server/channel and forums. And they were often small and meant for a specific community/hobby/interest. I was never a heavy IRC user, but yeah back in the 00s, especially the earlier two-thirds, I had several different forums on my browser hotbar that I’d make the rounds through a couple of times each day. Kind of miss that honestly, each forum was its own unique beast with an entirely different set of personalities without also being polarized. Contrast that to modern social networks which have a samey grey-paste quality unless one seeks out highly polarized services, which are often too caustic to spend time in without risking becoming similarly caustic yourself.
- burkaman 4y agoEver heard of Hacker News?
- flohofwoe 4y agoThose social networks are all sitting on top of the same internet, and everybody is on the internet (e.g. there's no reason why different social networks shouldn't be able to integrate with each other). (I shudder in horror to think what email would look like if it was invented today by some Silicon Valley techbro startup - interoperability somehow isn't even considered as an option anymore)
- naravara 4y ago> But the whole appeal of social networks is that everyone is there. No one likes to check 20 different apps to talk to 20 slightly different groups of people, or to follow 20 different celebrities they like. The nice thing about a federated system is that it's ONE app to talk to 20 slightly different groups of people.
- mejutoco 4y agoEveryone has email, but not everyone is on gmail, for instance.
- prmoustache 4y agoThe realit is no such network that can brag that everyone is there. The biggest one, Facebook, doesn't even have a third of the total population on earth as active users. Twitter, that we all love to talk about, has only a very small penetration with around 200 millions of active users. And there are still myriads of tiny web forums with very active communities. I don't think every social network needs to have a global penetration.
- kaba0 4y agoLet’s add that twitter has/had peaks up to the billion concurrent users scale during important global events.
- prmoustache 4y agoregistered users or hits? I guess the later only.
- bee_rider 4y agoThat’s not a social network, that’s a celebrity gossip site. The appeal of a social network is that all my friends are there.
- mcv 4y agoI've never used any of the big social networks to talk with my friends. I have no idea if they even are on Facebook or Twitter. But they have email and we have our own Discord place.
- berkes 4y ago> No one likes to check 20 different apps to talk to 20 slightly different groups of people Then why do we have Linkedin, Twitter, Reddit, Youtube, Orkut, Whatsapp, Instagram, SnapChat, QQ, Facebook, Hackernews, Discord, and Stackoverflow? What you say people don't want, is exactly what people already do.
- m3kw9 4y agoBecause the medium is different. Instagram is different images, twitter is text, Fb is more local social circle. But if you have 5 twitter clones, no one wants to use 5
- mcv 4y agoThe thing is, Fediverse could be all of those things. There's an Instagram clone, there's a YouTube clone, there's Mastodon that's similar to Twitter, and Friendica that's more like Facebook. And you can follow them all from a single account if you want.
- berkes 4y agoEven if the medium is different, the original statement was "no one wants to check 20 apps for 20 social media...". Which, as I've shown, is wrong, because already people do check 20 different apps for 20 social media accounts. If anything, activitypub fixes this. The whole idea of the protocol is interoperability: that you need only one app to check all of them. Whether they are 5 twitter clones talking AP, or a Linkedin, youtube, meetup, and twitter-alike talking AP: all are interoperable, and you can interact with all of them from just one account and app.
- rsynnott 4y agoI would note that you are writing this on a thriving small social network.
- izzydata 4y agoThat is then opposite of what I find appealing. Every community I have ever been a part of on the internet has only gotten worse and eventually unacceptably bad by growing too large. I also don't like the convergence of online identifies with real identifies in communities which also tends to ruin the point of an online community for me. So having different groups for different purposes is precisely what I do want and having every human on Earth on one platform is the exact opposite of what I would want.
- pixl97 4y agoBy growing large you attract predators and parasites, you must pay a very high price in moderation to removing this spam and trolling. An individual/small group of individuals fighting against every bad actor on the planet. By staying smaller you are more likely to fall under a 'dark forest'. You'll still be attacked by your local level trolls, but the likelihood you'll be attacked worldwide is lessened.
- lamontcg 4y ago> But the whole appeal of social networks is that everyone is there. literally posting this to the HN audience...
- indymike 4y ago> There's never really going to be such a thing as a thriving small social network. Says the post on a thriving discussion forum that isn't even a social network. Quality has a quality all of its own.
- madeofpalk 4y agoThe existance of Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Hacker News, Mastodon is proof this is not true.
- soneil 4y agoIn the real world, I have a network of colleagues at work. a network of friends at home. two separate networks that revolve around specific hobbies and rarely collide with the others. And when I go home, I have a latent network of friends & family. And there's absolutely no reason for any of these networks to cross paths. The idea that everyone needs to be in one network, is just as logical as my mother reading my HN comments.
- epolanski 4y agoThe appeal of reddit and tik tok is the content, not the fact that everyone is here.
- djur 4y agoI don't like checking different apps per se, but I absolutely want to have distinct social networking profiles and communities for my different interests. I'm happy to share my unremarkable opinions about technology with a wide audience, but I'd prefer not to talk about politics with everybody with a smartphone. I don't want to inflict my video game shitposting on my mom who wants to share her Wordle scores with me. For those who are inclined to such a thing, I don't think anyone would prefer to see their boss see them tweet peach emojis at influencers doing squats. And so on. None of the existing social networks perfectly serves all use cases, and I don't think they can.
- romwell 4y ago>There's never really going to be such a thing as a thriving small social network. You are saying this on Hackernews, out of all places... which is an example of one.
- afavour 4y agoMost of the author's complaints are about the cost and complexity of running an instance. That doesn't really have much to do with whether it rivals other social networks or not. But I agree, a better headline would be "Mastodon is Doomed as a Twitter replacement". It's fine for Mastodon to not want to be that. But at the same time a lot of recent arrivals were perfectly happy on Twitter and have only moved because of Musk's shenanigans. So long term they'll probably jump ship if a viable alternative comes along.
- BeetleB 4y ago> Most of the author's complaints are about the cost and complexity of running an instance. Correction: Most of the author's complaints are about the cost and complexity of running a large instance. I know people running their own instances, with less than 10 users, yet they are happily tooting with people in other instances. They aren't missing out on something that I, on one of the largest instances, have.
- afavour 4y agoPerformance is still dependent on user behaviour, no? If you have a user that follows 10k people then your server is going to start getting a lot busier?
- prmoustache 4y ago> Performance is still dependent on user behaviour, no? If you have a user that follows 10k people then your server is going to start getting a lot busier? If you have a user that starts following 10k user in a short time, you have a spam bot and not a user. The fediverse is not made in such a way that your social circle grows quickly. You usually starts by following people on your own instance, then people whose content is boosted by them and it only happens slowly and gradually.
- kjjhhhhyy 4y agoNo, this isn't really true, once you interact with another homeserver Mastodon starts slurping up content from it to fill the third tab on the home screen with content. The users it finds aren't necessarily ones you've interacted with -- I know from running single server instances I stopped running an instance because of this functionality. I was running Mastodon on my home Internet and quickly became concerned about the image content it was downloading from users I hadn't interacted with, while I wasn't monitoring the server There is a LOT of lolicon content on the Fediverse and NOTHING is worth the risk of running a server that might download material that's considered to be CSAM to my local computer while it is unsupervised So you have to worry about both the quantity of content it downloads and what that content is As an admin: no thanks.
- nonethewiser 4y ago> The author doesn't seem to realize that it's not necessary for Mastodon to reach the same scale as Twitter or Facebook. We might be headed for a more pluralistic future, with a large chunk of people on Mastodon, another big community on Bluesky, etc. I don’t think people want that. I mean some people, sure. But the network effect is real and I think the market will always demand one audience. Keep in mind this doesn’t mean it has to be centralized. It could be decentralized but connected. Isn’t that kinda what Bluesky or Mastadon are shooting for? Decentralized but interoperable?
- turnsout 4y agoThat's a common misconception. The network effect works even if the network is relatively small. And the market clearly does not demand one audience, since we currently have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, WeChat, YouTube, TikTok, Douyin, Weibo, QQ, and so on.
- kaba0 4y agoAlmost all of them are very different audiences, even mediums. Network effect is obviously an important part of a social media site, even if it’s not completely all-or-nothing.
- cpach 4y agoIt is an important part, that’s true. But not every scene/forum/product needs to reach the kind of scale where you would start thinking about running Superbowl ads.
- eitally 4y agoYes, but I think the OP was suggesting that the network effect to support a platform is much smaller than most people would think. Consider all the topical sites running PHPBB forums, for example. There are many thousands of vibrant communities around the internet, and they can all coexist peacefully. Many of them feature adds & commercial partnerships, too, and guess what? The click-through and performance of those things is relatively off-the-charts because they directly relevant to the captive audience's interests... especially if representatives from the advertisers directly participate in the community, which many do, and even moreso if the community + advertisers offer IRL community events (which many do). Besides the depth and stickiness of topical communities, these sites also tend to be almost universally friendly and helpful, even to n00bs and outsiders. It would be a tragedy if they were to be replaced by a one-size-fits-none platform.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago> We're all so steeped in the recent past of monolithic centralized social media platforms, but if we peek over our recency bias, we can see that it wasn't always that way. It wasn't always that way, but it nearly always ends up that way. Reason being the Internet makes it extremely easy to discover new services, and switching costs are relatively low. So this leads to the "winner take all (or nearly all)" dynamics that are so prevalent on the web - a service only needs to be slightly better than it's competitors to win. People talk about the concentration of big Internet projects and companies as if it were imposed from on high. The exact opposite happened: people flocked to the services they found to be the best, and told their friends about them.
- ryanklee 4y agoHmm, switching costs are high when monoliths reign, and competitors need to be much, much better in order to attract people from other offerings. I think what you are pointing to is how network effects suck up customers the first time when there's basically no competition doing the same thing. E.g. Facebook was doing something much, much better than myspace, and people flocked. But after that, switching costs became very high because of how entrenched people were on FB. It took an entire generation for that effect to atrophy, and this is unlikely because there were better alternatives, and more likely because of sociodynamics. Now it's TikTok and Twitter and people are having a very tough time figuring out how to get out of those platforms even when they sorta hate them. High switching costs because of network effects. Doesn't matter if there's a slightly better product. There needs to be either a massively better product or the existing products need to be seen as culturally undesirable (e.g. Facebook is cringe).
- loudmax 4y agoThe appeal of a federated platform is that it's decentralized without being siloed. If Bluesky decides it's in their interest, they could probably figure out some way to federate with Mastodon.
- AtlasBarfed 4y agoThe one key advantage centralized social/messaging has is spam control. Of course that's because spam is unrealized and unregulated advertising revenue that the platform doesn't control. How does Mastodon prevent itself from becoming email? I'm unfamiliar with the design. Do you simply turtle your trust with other servers? One of the interesting things I haven't seen with advanced AI is the antispam AI. I would love to have a semi-trustable service that reviewed incoming numbers/messages and evaluated them against expert level manipulation, propaganda, advertising, and con techniques. Of course that then provides access to the agent ... You'd THINK facebook and google have advanced AI language models for these given ChatGPT's abilities, but I've never seen or heard anything like that. Then again, that would be customer focused, and google and facebook are now more spam/con than pro-consumer utility. Ha, if ChatGPT is REALLY converging to the point of coding actual systems (1-2 years maybe???), then I would like to weaponize it to counter the api drift defense used by the social media walled gardens. No one has been able to truly integrate your social media content across the walls. Because no integration stands the constant drift of api interface. BUT, if chatgpt can constantly adapt to the changes, you might be able to do it. Consider that while the walled gardens can shift their APIs to some degree, they can't shift them REALLY fast, because their "actual" partners need some stability. So I might be able to AI adapt-scrape from my sources and centralize better. I don't think that is within ChatGPT's current abilities, but I don't think it is that far. "Turtling" : a defensive, cautious approach to expansion in RTS and 4X games, rather than reckless expansion and "mixing it up". In this context, you carefully whitelist nodes conservatively, but you'll miss a lot of content and people.
- RajT88 4y agoThat was my kneejerk reaction too. It's like saying, "PHPBB is doomed!".
- 98codes 4y agoAnd as someone that's recently left Twitter behind where that would've been unthinkable a year ago -- it's clearer than ever to me now that none of it matters. If I were to lose everything on Mastodon tomorrow, oh well.
- FalconSensei 4y ago> We might be headed for a more pluralistic future, with a large chunk of people on Mastodon, another big community on Bluesky, etc. Which I think is a good thing, and it's also how it was before, on the BBS/Forums days.
- princevegeta89 4y agoI don't understand the "doomed" concept here. How can a non-profit be doomed? Even if it shuts down, it's still not doomed since someone else will fork the project over or take ownership.
- wslh 4y agoYes, it is always good to remember that the BitTorrent protocol is successful though.
- romwell 4y ago>The author doesn't seem to realize that it's not necessary for Mastodon to reach the same scale as Twitter or Facebook. We might be headed for a more pluralistic future, with a large chunk of people on Mastodon, another big community on Bluesky, etc. Did you read the article? It's right there in the end: >Mastodon will continue as a niche community and it will have lots of happy users. I’m greatful for the admins that have dedicated so much of their time running instances, and thank you to the admins who shared their instance financial information. >If you love Mastodon I’m happy for you. The internet needs bold bets and people to invest in them.