I’ve been thinking about this a bit more lately. I’m also a happy Mastodon user for a few months now and I agree it looks more like twitter then like Facebook, when you think about it though, what is the reason for this?
Just like on Facebook you can post things your friends/followers can see and you can look at the posts your friends make. Where is the difference?
Sure there is a character limit but at 500 that is not too restrictive, I don’t think that is what makes the difference. Intuitively this is what makes it feel more like twitter then like facebook to me though.
Facebook offers a lot more then just the posting, it offers event scheduling, it has a real-time messenger and probably some other stuff I’m forgetting. This is really useful stuff but I don’t think that is what makes the difference between facebook and twitter.
What I think is the real difference between the two: On facebook you’re expected to use your real name and to connect mostly to people you know IRL. Twitter and Mastodon don’t have this, there you are mostly connected to internet friends or celebrities.
I think the difference lies mostly in the usage, less in the actual underlying code. Of course the code steers people to behave in a certain way, there aren’t really any limitations that force you to actually behave that way. I feel like you could use mastodon as a near perfect replacement for the “post writing/reading” part of facebook. You just won’t get the same experience because the audience will be different.
I do think we need to think about open-source alternatives. What I’m really going to miss from facebook, what I would really like a Open Source alternative to, is the events-feature and the “auto-updating contact list”-feature. I know all the roughly three hundred people in my friends list, but would never be able to remember them all let alone manage to keep up a database of their contacts. Facebook makes that really easy and more then once I’ve been able to get in contact with a old acquaintance that had just the right contacts to get me some valuable info or get me in touch with someone hard to reach.
