Mastodon

[danbrotherston]

You're giving the average person too much credit and I think not getting it.

Stuff like Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook and so on work because they're extremely straightforward. You create an account in 60 seconds and bang, you're online and can be following whatever sort of thing you want. A 70 year old grandma can sign up while she sips tea and become a popular poster. It's simple, which is great. The average person - the vvvaaaaasssstttt majority of users on the internet these days - don't have the patience for messing around with hunting out servers/instances that suit their interest and finding friends. They want instant, mass results and they want to be part of what is the biggest platform where the most people are. Gone are the days of the internet most of us grew up with in the 90s or 80s where it was actually decentralized and everybody on it got to do their own thing, whether it was making ASCII art, posting in Usenet groups or IRC channels or designing a Geocities page. About the only mainstream thing left that resembles that these days is Tumblr but they killed themselves by - seriously - banning porn, which is kinda amusing. I believe Linus Tech Tips said that recently regarding Twitter/Musk and how making bad choices like that can have a huge impact on your userbase/revenue. Twitter is filled to the brim with porn, amongst other things. Nothing is really going to change, there will just be more hate and shitposting.

And the same is true for email and phone which is why gmail and hotmail (and Bell and Rogers) control most of the market. So people will just join mastodon.social or mstdn.social and be done with it. Not necessarily ideal, but perfectly reasonable and perfectly approachable to most people.

And joining ANY fediverse server puts you in the fediverse which is (in theory) where everyone is. There's no reason you cannot follow people anywhere.

Our things are what we make of them. Money has a corrupting influence, but the idea that the "days of old" are gone are completely false. I'm literally posting this in a phpBB community of people talking about stuff I'm interested. Not only is it the same thing we did in the "days of old" it's using the same damn codebase.

The culture of the internet and people and actual generations has simply changed. People no longer care about that stuff. I think they should because I grew up on the "old" internet where I was one of those people making ASCII art, lurking obscure IRC groups, phone phreaking etc. But thanks to the way the internet has become so corporatized and Web 2.0'd (and now, increasingly, Web 3.0'd) everyone has forgotten that. Or was just never part of that old internet so they don't get it. That's what I mean by saying something like Mastodon will never be that big. It's way too niche, requires way too much effort (in reality, very little effort, but people have little patience these days) and is too confusing for most people who are used to the current ecosystems. I'd love to return to an era where the internet was treated as it was intended: a crazy wild west where you are free to do what you want, say what you want and talk to who you want but I think that's hard to return to. Almost all technologies out there get simpler and easier to use for people with time.

As for Musk, I think he's just a socially inept idiot that got sucked into being one of those chronically online fools now suffering from brain rot and this is the result. He's extremely basic...even 4chan users are more intelligent than this guy. He's just a shitty businessman that took advantage of things to get where he is, became extremely "online" due to memes and algorithms, fell down some lame rabbit holes of far-right conspiratorial misinformation and because he has a lot of money, thought it would be an ePiC TrOLl to buy Twitter and start shit. I mean the guy is online for tens of hours a day fighting with check marks like Stephen King. He's a moron, very bored (probably emotionally empty inside, if I had to guess) and very rich. He'll probably do incredible damage to Twitter but it's not going to go bankrupt. There's waaaaayyyyy too much at stake. Just advertisers alone will eventually come smack him and say smarten up (even though some have left - for now - due to his actions, but that just seems like platitudes...at the end of the day they want money and advertising on Twitter = money). It is the social network right now with everything from a brutal war in Ukraine unfolding on it, billions of dollars in advertising taking place on it, journalists and politicians and everyone in between using it as a communication medium and so on. He's right to call it the world's town square or whatever. It's not going to vanish because it's way too important.

Also another problem with Mastodon is that you just get a bunch of Mini Musks. My server must be run this way! Only this can be said! You must follow these rules. It just creates this niche, gated echo chamber where you end up with specific groups of people who think or believe etc the same way. The reason something like Twitter or Instagram works so well is that you can pretty much get away with anything on there. You might get banned eventually, but you're able to go on there and talk about your cooking, your pet cat, dox people you don't like, post videos of rapes, spread state propaganda etc. It is an incredibly open forum for communication which is why it's so big. You can't have that with a bunch of federated servers that are all cocooned and full of people who think the same. As I said, Mastodon for sure has its uses because you can go on there and talk about whatever little thing you want with others, but it's always going to remain small due to how it pigeonholes everything into a corner (despite a global timeline, but that's a mess).

If you don't like how the Mastodon instance you signed up with is being run, then you can move to another one. With the large number of people joining lately, I am sure that there will be some well run ones.
Since Mastodon is federated, you are not stuck following the people on your local instance. I am seeing some journalists joining Mastodon and I think that there may be servers catering to them. You seem to be making a lot of assumptions about what people are capable of or willing to do when motivated.
One more thing: there is porn on twitter???!!! You must be following different people than I am. I don't recall anybody that I follow posting porn.

Yeah, I wouldn't say it's "filled to the brim" but there is porn on twitter, it's within their TOS but the algorithm does a good job separating uses so unless you actually follow porn stars (or hentai artists or something like that) you aren't going to get served any of that content. Twitter did a decent job of managing that, with both permissive policies but with enough siloing that nobody's getting offended.