Hot-take think pieces on how "bad" fedi is by people who joined a week ago remind me of this seminal article of deep insight:
https://mashable.com/article/mastodon-wont-survive
> Six reasons Mastodon won't survive
It was published 5.5 years ago (and counting).
@rysiek Amazing that they thought that splitting the Fediverse into a bunch of independently run communities is "siloing".
That's the exact opposite!
war is peace
freedom is slavery
fedi is siloing
Clearly someone took the "ignorance is strength" bit a tad too much to heart…
@Alex A new article that came out today is decisely illuminating about the fact that before writing something about this platform man should try it for some time: https://escapingtech.com/tech/opinions/i-was-wrong-about-mastodon-moderation.html
@rysiek
Hmm let's see here:
1. Fair enough
2. Repeat after me: FEEAATURE. Feature
3. Already mostly gone for better or worse
4. What on earth are you talking about?
5. Literally just use the full handle. @someone@example.com
6. Again, that's a feature
@rysiek empty profile, 51 posts all in Apr '17, zero replies to anyone. Also, all his posts are whinging about Mastodon and he wonders why nobody likes him.
@rysiek
To Quote:
> In trying to satisfy a spike of new users, Mastodon... separated them into silos and made it hard if not impossible for them to all socialize.
What? Mastodon's "silos" are due to it being a consumer of activity pup and is deliberately to avoid the singular monolithic moderation system. This literally has nothing to do with a "spike of new users". Are journalists supposed to do research and employ fact checkers?
Nevermind, dumb question.
@rysiek back when Red Hat broke the $1bn/year barrier (I think that was the milestone) the PR people release a barage of all the negative quotes over the years.
@rysiek aside from not aging well, Mashable was one of the first publishers to jump on the Mastodon news wagon a few weeks ago. Gotta get them ad impressions.
@rysiek I've not seen any of these (recent) articles - can you share?
@gabrielquotes I'd rather not promote them.
@rysiek convincing myself point 3/ might have vexed Eugen and led him to seek to remove the toot-based terminology
@geist and yet everyone calls posts here "toots" anyway, and somehow that's not stopping anyone from migrating here.
This whole toot thing has always been a nothingburger.
Toot!
@rysiek Wow.
It's amazing just how much they got wrong in that article.
@KryptykPhysh it's a work of art, really.
Flashing images
Flashing images
@rysiek “Mastodon is so popular right now that it can’t support all the potential users on one platform, so there are dozens of them”
Wow. Talk about getting paid to announce to the world how utterly clueless you are about your subject matter.
*smh*
@aral yeah, the whole piece misses the point so hilariously in so many places that it almost feels like parody.
Almost.
@rysiek Well, if you call this "surviving..."
@rysiek shame there are legit issues with Mastodon (one or two are even pointed out) but as someone else said the ratio is wildly out of balance like 90% of this is nonsense. Most these don't matter or were clearly fixed. I think the emphasis on centralization kinda misses the opportunity to recognize the power of decentralization. Yeah it doesn't work like Twitter and Facebook but what about email? That's not centralized and it's great. Mastodon could become the SM equiv of email
@rysiek This article has aged badly
@to3k this article was badly aged at the moment of publishing.
@rysiek yup but now the proof of concept is clear so there is no doubt
@rysiek this reminds me of the perennial posts I see about my game project being in imminent risk of demise after a decade of development and releases because I keep going in the same direction with it.
@kevingranade ooh, what's the game project?
@rysiek Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead
https://cataclysmdda.org
Open source, windows/mac/linux/android/(WASM COMING SOON) builds, Post-Apocalyptic survival RPG.
@rysiek bwahaha, "It's a tough moment in Twitter's ongoing quest to pivot to on-air-all-the-time media streaming service", How's that going for you Twitter?
@rysiek wow the valid-point :: failure-to-research ratio there is really low, even for 5+ years ago.
@rysiek "there is no single mastodon"... but that's the point? there is no single email, there is no single phone service company, and there shouldn't be a single social media host?
@xolagix "there is no single bakery, therefore it is impossible to buy bread; bakeries are just too confusing for regular users."
Nice to see his current opinion on Mastodon, as of 11 days ago at least:
https://www.techradar.com/opinion/as-we-bury-twitter-its-time-to-dig-up-mastodon
@Sar oh shi- what if he is wrong now?
@Sar forme it's the choice of the term used that is the problem in this sentence: "monetization" assumes people using the service are treated as if they were farmed, in a way, in order to be "monetized".
It's just a completely incorrect frame of reference when talking about most instances on fedi.
@rysiek That piece needs reposting weekly
@kat @rysiek, I do have some worries, but they are not inevitabilities, and more importantly, my most pessimistic take still leaves it better than the alternatives.
I need to write things up properly, but I see a path by which something like Google could co-opt the system. I watched Google destroy Usenet.
I don’t see this as a likely outcome for Mastodon, but that doesn’t stop me from worrying.
@jpgoldberg @kat oh absolutely, I have many of the same worries!
And we should talk about them and engage with them, and try to make fedi better and more resilient.
But silly absolute hot-takes like "Mastodon won't survive" are not doing that.
@kat @rysiek Imagine if Google set up their own instance and instantly brought everyone with a gmail address into it. If they manage to handle abuse well enough that others might federate with them. There would be genuine reasons for some to allow peering. And it connects to a lot of people. Once that gets established as normal, the Google instance will have a huge amount of power.
@kat @rysiek, Sure lots of instances won’t federate with Google, but some will. And in that world Google will dominate. Newcomers may well choose to join instances where they can connect to people in Google’s world.
I don’t see this as likely, but I think that Google and Meta will try. At the start they may be genuinely well-meaning, making it harder to justify blocking them.
@jpgoldberg @rysiek
Someone earlier imagined the following future..
automattic to buy .social, and sell ad supported hosted domains on it, with option to self install if you wish.
Who knows.. lets keep "shitposting" whilst we can ? x
@rysiek All the people that joined last month, tried out a single instance of one of the many fedi software, and are absolutely sure they know what exactly is wrong and what will be the consequences, sometimes even how to fix it.
(Don't get me wrong, first impressions are very cool, but they are still first impressions and not the end-all about the place.)
@eldaking and it's valid to document such first impressions and talk about them, as this helps make fedi better.
But hot-takes like "this is why it cannot work" are just very meh.
@rysiek Yep. Each and every wave they crop up. Sometimes they're the same old articles with different titles (seriously).
@rysiek wow, that article HAS aged poorly. 2/6 issues no longer exist (toots and handles not being in URLs), and 3/6 are consequences of decentralization that have been improved upon, and worked fine anyway for those who have used Mastodon since 2016, and the Fediverse since 2008. All that remains is the name. Lots of little errors, too.
I'm sure Mastodon will fade out eventually, but decentralized platforms will be around for a long time.
@rysiek I like how the 2 arguments that were making sense are gone. user numbers in url? gone long ago (and it was only on the logged-in interface). no official apps? here they are
@FediThing @rysiek oh the good times..
amazing that to this day nobody even bothered to open some clones just to have some fun parodying him, and the only "clone" is actually him going back in 2020 to a different instance and bitching about being locked out of his other account because he changed emails and forgot it. Reading through both of his accounts from start to finish is social media comedy gold
@FediThing @rysiek
To be fair to the #DailyHeil , I wrote to a customer in 1988 and told him that Microsoft Windows was a fad and to stick with MS-DOS for his new accounts system.
Whilst my prediction was wrong, the decision was right as the Windows version of his accounts package was slow and crap.
We are still talking 30 odd years later, I consult for him on Cybersecurity
@FediThing @rysiek they were ever so slightly wrong with that one
@FediThing @rysiek
Oophs The Daily Fail have got it wrong again
Just noticed the author's Mastodon account says "Social Media Expert"
@FediThing yeah, that's immediately a red flag.