shrug FidoNet was doomed, too, in the long run. Newsfroups were doomed, in the long run. AOL was doomed, too. Friendster. Livejournal. The Blogosphere. Fli

shrug FidoNet was doomed, too, in the long run. Newsfroups were doomed, in the long run. AOL was doomed, too. Friendster. Livejournal. The Blogosphere. Flickr. Xanga. Diaryland. Myspace. Twitter. Facebook. Tiktok. Instagram. Youtube. Discord. IRC. Slack. That thing you're working on that involves a blockchain. Nostr. Bluesky. I give you this litany of doomed social networks. Some have fallen long ago. Some are still hanging on. Some are just beginning to fall. Mastodon, right now, is rising. In ten years will we still be using it? In ten years will we remember it fondly as a transitional stage to whatever future ActivityPub clients and hosts we use to connect with our friends, build communities, and share the work of filtering out people who want to use us purely as a source of profit, or who are actively opposed to our continuing existence? In ten years will we all once more be in one monolithic corporate-owned profit-seeking social network, remembering wistfully when it looked like we might be breaking free of those chains for a while? Even so, whatever we are using in that future: it, too, is doomed. Newspapers were doomed. Magazines were doomed. Social media is doomed. Mastodon is hiring right now. Do you think it needs to be lighter on resources, easier to run, easier to personalize? I run one and I certainly think so. Do you have the skills to make it those things? Send them a resume. Tell them that this is what you want to do. Do you have the money to not worry about paying the bills for a few years after, say, working at Disney's feature division, then helping them build their streaming service, then moving over to Amazon for a while? Then take a working vacation: grab the source, start making proposals, start offering major patches. Mastodon is doomed. Will you stand by and comment on its demise? Will you do something to keep it running? Will you try to hasten that doom for the good of the Fediverse by building an alternative server with a well-tested "import everything from an existing Mastodon in one click" button? I dunno, I'm not you.