Federation is an idea that is great in principle but insanely difficult in practice. Hence the problem. I applaud the effort though, and hope we learn from it.
There are topics on meta.discourse.org asking us to federate Discourse instances but I always scratched my head as to how that would work, exactly. How about we just have lots of different websites? That’s worked well enough for the last, say, 30 years?
Doesn’t that fly in the face of the reality that the Twiiters, instagrams, and facebooks of the world have consumed all content generation and those other websites are basically full of content from the big three?
“The way we did it for 30 years is fine” works for people who never bought into the “big sites for content” mode of using the internet. And we are the vast minority.
Hm. I could do this:
https://trashpanda-x.github.io/darklantern/#Today%20in%20history
Or I could do this:
Let’s see which gets more interest (before it crushes my RPi3).
Of course, an RSS feed would do the trick too. 
A mastodon is soft and squishy: the problems of measurement.
I created two accounts and get the RSS for free.
Two helpful advancements on that front:
1: Individual instance owners are posting stats. The instance I call home, mstdn.ca, recently posted their state of the instance and noted their user base went from 60 to 24,500 in this recent migration. And this was one of the smaller instances!
2: @fediverse@mastodon.cat is a bot that actively walks running servers and asks them what their stats are, including Monthly Active users (MAU). So this is somewhat more accurate than prior bots.
This is all fun, but really more about directionality than specifics. The real tally doesn’t matter here, more the growth month/month. 
Well, a distressing (to Facebook) percent of posts on Facebook are now links to TikTok videos as @smulder pointed out. I think it’s perfectly fine to have a few big global-ish social networks and a lot of smaller special interest community websites. Like… a lot a lot. Millions.
We still need viable global social networks for the simple basic phonebook use case, e.g. if someone is online, how do you reach out and contact them?
But we need at minimum a Coke/Pepsi duality, and ideally 5-6 major “internet user directory” social networks… one of my biggest fears is Facebook owning the internet and they came darn close between Facebook and Instagram, but I feel that Zuck’s obsession with the useless “metaverse” and TikTok being Chinese and beyond their reach (and wildly popular) is hopefully ensuring that won’t happen. 
Sure, but my original point here was specifically about the viability of Mastodon as one of these global-ish social networks. I think from your posts you agree with me - the Fediverse is not going to be able to challenge for a position as one of those global-ish social networks, and moreover that it probably shouldn’t, because we are better with decentralized content to begin with?
Ahhh I suggest a minor title edit to clarify. You say in first post
Maston will never achieve any sort of real success
but success at what? I would argue Mastodon has only recently reached the actual threshold of success as a viable thing that a reasonable number of people use, largely thanks to the Twitter exodus?
Indeed! Quite so. Fixed. Thanks!
That tells me that, for now at least, engagement on Mastodon is significantly higher than on either LinkedIn or Twitter.
That’s the sort of thing that might make journalists and news organizations chained to Twitter take notice.
Of course, that’s a tech story, and tech people are much more likely to be on Mastodon than others.
Somehow I don’t think the click through rates would he e been the same proportions on a tabloid story or on gardening tips.
The other challenge for Mastodon: grifters trying to carve out pieces of the commons.
If you haven’t heard of pawoo.net, it’s because many instances have de-federated from it.
Crappy web3 types using not-yet-evaporated-crypto-coin hoping to buy big enough chunks of federated space that everyone else won’t defederate from them.
“There are a lot of people who really don’t realize what they’re getting themselves into,” says Corey Silverstein, an attorney who specializes in internet law. “If you’re running these [instances], you have to run it like you’re the owner of Twitter. What people don’t understand is how complicated it is to run a platform like this and how expensive it is.”
But that’s how the owner of Twitter runs it. 
Yeah, this was the point I was trying to make. All these hard choices are going to start being a thing now, and unprepared instance operators are going to find themselves in untenable positions pretty quickly.
Here’s a really simple one: Mastodon instances download any shared media locally (as does this here BBS). We’ve had both takedown requests and outright legal challenges to stuff we post here. Are operators ready for that? How about in multiple countries?
And what about when advertising or commercial services inevitably enter the fediverse? There’s going to be a schism between the (now ultraminority) old guard and the horses of new users. This is already happening with artists getting reported for trying to sell their creations there.
What happens from here is going to be telling. Musk gave mastodon a gift in visibility and, I think, inertia. What happens with it now?
This is the thing that drives me nuts with conversations about the internet. Perhaps I am naïve or weird, but I don’t see why online platforms have to be used by everyone to be useful.
I know why Silicon Valley VCs think that – a business with < 108 users can’t make billions in ad revenue and is beneath their contempt – but it’s bizarre that everyone else accepts it. Especially as it’s never been so: there was never a time when everyone only used Twitter or Facebook or even email.
There have been a lot of “civilisation can’t exist without Twitter” takes recently, and we haven’t heard much dissent, but I don’t think that means it’s true. It says a lot about how few people we really get to hear from, and how twitter addiction has ravaged their community. But to me it is obvious that if Twitter went dark tomorrow, it… wouldn’t matter.
We should get by now that these websites are more like movies or concerts; they blow up, then they’re the past. Perhaps the reason we’re confused is that movies now also aim to be permanent lifestyle brands, for the same corporate-ass reasons. But how often do you hear about someone who had to get a divorce because they met their spouse on MySpace, or had to change careers because a Facebook alpaca-farming group went dormant? Relationships that matter, by definition, don’t depend on a particular website.
A forum with a hundred users can be at least as valuable as Twitter to the people who use it. It can even be a living for the people who run it. It just can’t make anyone a billionaire. But if we could somehow endure that sacrifice, we could have millions of platforms and thousands of tailored approaches to moderation and discovery. Perhaps the end of unlimited free VC money will make this difficult decision for us.
(I still don’t see Mastodon happening, though. Who needs a new platform in Twitter’s image?)
This is kind of weird to me. I’ve spent a little time messing with Mastodon lately and I’ve not seen anything even remotely like this. Maybe you’re on some sketchy instance? The more prominent ones tend to avoid federating with instances that allow hate speech and such. That will organically keep the terrible instances more niche since they won’t be amplified by the more popular ones who know that having an unsafe environment will keep people away.
But the big difference is that there’s no profit motive with Mastodon. Twitter is not a charity. It is in the business of selling ads. For people to see your ads, you need engagement from your users. Interesting content is one way to drive engagement, but fomenting anger is even better because it’s so low effort. Just throw around a few hateful terms or memes, @ the right people, and you’ll get amplified in no time. (You can just recycle someone else’s content, win win.) It’s in Twitter’s interest to push rage into your timeline so you engage with it.
I didn’t say everyone… I said critical mass. The reality is that it has to reach some sort of number to be stable. It doesn’t need to be endless growth, or all of humanity, just enough to keep things going. Because the POINT of these technologies is to enable communication and networking.
Which is not what I said… But we’ve reached a tipping point with the internet and social media that eliminating it altogether will very much upend a lot of our political, cultural, and social world. Just like getting rid of cars or telephones or mass media, etc, etc, would have consequences that would upend the current social order. That’s not world ending, but it would be disruptive. How about instead of failing around, we plan ahead and figure out a path forward…
So that would be a critical mass.
I still think that a public alternative to private, for profit social media platforms is a good idea.
Yes, I was agreeing with you!
