This is exactly why I avoid things like Mastodon as well, because the problem isn't who controls the format, it's the format itself. Who controls the format sure doesn't help, but if you imagine Mastodon becoming as universally adopted as Twitter and seriously don't think it would be a massive mess, then I envy your optimism.

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opan 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

Fedi is different because it isn't proprietary or centralized. A new proprietary and/or centralized alternative is never the answer. That's just buying time.

Personally I am not a fan of the Mastodon software or side of fedi, but I have had good times on the Pleroma/Akkoma side, and it all works together.

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OJFord 7 days ago | parent [-]

It will never be 'it', because I - despite being technically capable of running server on bare metal or something - have no idea what you're talking about. Fedi, Mastodon, Pleroma, Akkoma, there's too much to know or read about before you can just use it. People go to Facebook, to twitter.com, and just sign up and use it and know what it is.

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setr 7 days ago | parent [-]

I don’t think that matters that much; it’s still just a popularity contest, and if something manages to break through that threshold, it’ll be trivial enough to make the default.

No one knew Reddit boards and 4chan boards either; you just knew to go to /b/ or /r/funny. The other boards, the other fediverse servers, are just details that enable other subcommunities to survive. The major community will just route to a single server, and most will probably never use a second

	▲	jama211 7 days ago \| parent [-]
		Not who you were speaking to, but you just tried to trivialise the power of friction in a signup process, which goes _strongly_ against all known research on the topic.

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Jyaif 7 days ago | parent | prev [-]

A social network does not have to be universally adopted to be interesting because the vast majority of the folks do not do or think anything interesting.

A social network with just the top 1% of the geeks would be absolutely amazing.

	▲	jama211 7 days ago \| parent [-]
		They called it a “Trojan horse” they shouldn’t be distracted from. They were stating that it was more likely to fail, which isn’t true. You can challenge that without challenging the idea that mastodon can still be a cool place, no one said they couldn’t.