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Mastodon is absolutely not dead, and will outlast both Twitter and Bluesky as far as I can tell -- as someone who has been an early adopter in every single soci
by amatecha 2y ago
Mastodon is absolutely not dead, and will outlast both Twitter and Bluesky as far as I can tell -- as someone who has been an early adopter in every single social media platform (or precursor thereof) since the mid-90's. Why? There isn't some top-down capitalistic motive to destroy the platform. It will continue to exist, because it is a protocol defined/evolved by the community with zero incentive for profitability or pleasing of rich shareholders. It keeps plodding along, no noise, no ads, no algorithm, just people communicating with each other.
Especially as communities evolve and gain greater trust amongst each other, the platform will actually strengthen as far as I can tell -- this is already happening, as there are servers we know we can "trust" and those we know we can't (mastodon.social) because they have open-door policy and poor moderation.
I could go on about it all day, but ActivityPub is so far the absolute best technology for social communities I've ever seen/used (not that there aren't things that can be improved, of course).
- MichaelZuo 2y agoI don’t see how it can be a Twitter replacement, at best a reddit/Discord/IRC replacement but even that seems very unlikely. e.g. Are there even guarantees that a bad admin can’t mess with someone’s previous posts?
- amatecha 2y agoI know the admin of my server and all moderators personally. I'm not sure what your point is. The people who run services you use can mess with your stuff - in WoW a GM stole items from my guild's guild bank using the account of a guildmate who was permabanned, for example.
- MichaelZuo 2y agoIt’s simply not credible to expect tens of thousands of random people to be scrupulous 100% of the time. Centralized services try to solve the issue by simply never giving out such authority outside of a small handpicked group. (And even then a reddit admin was caught red handed doing it a while back) Edit: And so the trust that takes years to build up can be lost in a few seconds of bad decisions…
- oguz-ismail 2y ago> Mastodon is absolutely not dead, It sucks though, I don't know ONE normal person who's on Mastodon.
- amatecha 2y agoOh yeah? I know a few ppl who are on fediverse but aren't comfortable sharing their account, interestingly. Also, yeah, for now it's mostly techie/geeky/academic types who are on Mastodon, with a good slice of artistic/creative people coming in as well. I follow a couple artists who barely know how to use the software but are posting frequently and having lots of good discussions and stuff. Pretty sweet. Oh also, it might seem more dead than it really is because some people post primarily "followers-only". I only have one or two posts a month that can be seen by "everyone".
- phoronixrly 2y agoThank god for that... I love Mastodon, but the moment it experiences an Eternal September, I will be done once and for all with social media. At this point I consider the technical/usability hurdles of it a feature that filters out people that are not my kind of people...
- kalleboo 2y agoI don't know one normal person who's on Hacker News either