> There are no other options now. XMPP never went away. Nor did IRC. Nor did USENET. The entire old Internet is still there, protocol-wise. It is unused becau

> There are no other options now. XMPP never went away. Nor did IRC. Nor did USENET. The entire old Internet is still there, protocol-wise. It is unused because users don't want it; it's clunky, it requires manual maintenance, it just plain doesn't work as well. > Google won’t rank those projects higher than they’re legally required to, so not many people see it You don't have to invoke a conspiracy to explain why these projects rank low. Google bases its rankings (primarily) on "interest to users" signals. And they just don't have the interest. It is a chicken-egg problem, but the egg smells. When Facebook has 2 billion daily active users and Mastodon just topped 1.8 million, the naive assumption is that Google 2,000 times as likely to guess if you're talking about "social network," you mean Facebook. And it's not about propaganda. No amount of propaganda is going to make my mom comfortable running her own Mastodon node, or help her find my grandfather's posts when he's on a different node. Users don't want the complexity. The web used to be more complex and we moved away from that as people. > Mastodon kind of sucks right now ... and is pretty much the best thing outside the walled gardens. That's the issue. The wildnerness is full of tigers. > They’re not waiting for a savior because they don’t feel the effects daily beyond a few ads. It’s a slow process that hides the true outcome. I think we agree on this but I don't know what you mean by "true outcome." The true outcome is people use the Internet for what they want and then get on with their lives.