3 ms·
Articles like this seem to fall just short of the goal line. For instance, this line: > Like Wordpress, the best way to use Mastodon is to pay a company to run
by MR4D 3y ago
Articles like this seem to fall just short of the goal line. For instance, this line:
> Like Wordpress, the best way to use Mastodon is to pay a company to run it for you.
Why didn't the author just go one more step to realize that most people don't run their own Wordpress instance, and Wordpress is thriving?
I use Wordpress daily, and my company uses it - but it's hosted, not a self-run thing.
The author is most likely right in that most people either will stop running their own instance, and out source it. But this is a time-honored pattern in IT. Many of us used to run our own email, web servers, Wordpress, etc. But for most of us, we've replaced that with services to do the same.
There is no reason that there can't be a successful mastodon ecology just like there is for Wordpress.
It makes sense that there would be many mastodon.example.com sites run by all sorts of folks, but hosted by different providers.
Why can't articles like this see that?
- JustinGarrison 3y ago[OP] very good point and Wordpress has a ton of adoption. I used to run my own until it got hacked multiple times over a years and I got tired of fixing or restoring it. Once tumblr has ActivityPub integration it'll have the largest node in the network. Is it still Mastodon? Isn't that just tumblr and the AP integration is an alternative RSS/Atom? Then Mastodon becomes Google Reader with comments and stars?
- MR4D 3y ago>Isn't that just tumblr... In my eyes, if a bunch of different platforms have a reasonable degree of interoperability, and Mastodon is connected into that datastream, then Mastodon has won (and not doomed). Because in the end, the federation allows people to take their toys and go home if they so choose, and the risk of being censured or "de-platformed" essentially goes away. I think about email a lot in these conversations, and I remember when we used to have to set up sendmail and all sorts of other crap to have email. Now, sendmail has basically gone away, but we use email more than ever, and billions of people are still connected. Sendmail was that original structure that that broke apart the proprietary & enclosed email systems like CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, etc. To me, there are still issues with the email ecosystem today, but I don't lament sendmail's loss of market share, and I don't think of it as "doomed" but rather a huge success that spawned a massive industry. I think of AltaVista as doomed, because Google replaced it, and there was no shared or interoperable search ecosystem. Does that make sense? Hard for me to put into writing without rambling. ---- EDIT: meant to add that I liked your article, and I could tell you put a ton of work into it.