Eugen Rochko is the CEO of Mastodon — the open-source decentralized competitor to Twitter. It’s where a lot of Twitter users have gone in our post-Elon Musk era.
The idea of Mastodon is that you don’t join a single platform that one company controls. You join a server, and that server can show you content from users across the entire network. If you decide you don’t like the people who run your server or you think they’re moderating content too strictly, you can leave and take your followers and social graph with you. Think about it like email, and you’ll get it. If you don’t like Gmail, you can switch to something else, but you don’t have to quit email entirely as a concept.
So i’ve poked around the fediverse a little bit and I wouldn’t underestimate the power of “ease of use”.
And while I think microblogging is the worst format for social media … I again wouldn’t underestimate how relatively attractive it is to follow a person and just send off a small message and get one back … the direct personal interaction of a straight forward microblogging platform is probably quite good for ramping people onto a new system.
Part of the problem is that Mastodon is arguably not a great citizen of the fediverse. Maybe no platform is to be honest (I really don’t know). In my view, there’s a point at which a certain level of dominance that ethically demands action in favour of the fediverse over the particular platform one works on. In Mastodon’s case, that point has probably been reached … maybe a while ago.
Without a strong sense of such a culture … I fear the fediverse will always have the potential to go the way of Linux Desktop: (IMO) a fractured, confusing (and probably lower quality than it needs to be) array of options that puts-off many would be open source users and so never took off even after it was too late (ie, everyone uses android and iOS now anyway).