I had high hopes for Mastodon, but it just doesn’t seem to be catching on with average consumers who can’t seem to wrap their heads around the concept of a de-centralised and federated platform.
My feeling now is that, if Zuckerberg is interested in throwing money at it, Threads will eventually supplant Xitter for organisations, advertisers, and users who want a “safe” non-Nazi bar. Still not great, because it’s a Facebook company, but there are a lot of unsophisticated people who don’t mind FB.
The good news is that Threads is using ActivityPub, which means that the protocol has a chance at wider adoption if Threads achieves success. At that point, journalists and organisations might finally see the benefits of starting their own Mastodon servers and still being able to connect to users on pseudo-centralised Threads.
First though, a critical mass news outlets and journalists that value their role as a liberal-democratic institution will have to leave a platform that clearly doesn’t respect the value of democracy.
