(11-16-2022, 07:37 PM)bravado Wrote: I think if you need to write a Medium blog post about how to use your platform, it's just not intuitive. We'll see how it goes over time!
A good summary.
I'll bet what Elon Musk paid to buy Twitter to bet that Mastodon never becomes anything comparable to Twitter. It's just too much effort. For a forum that talks about how lazy people are for driving and all that stuff, people are giving the average person with a phone or keyboard in their hand way too much credit. Mastodon is cool but will likely always struggle. Your average person has way too much going on in life than to worry about the ethics of using a darn website, nevermind just taking 20 minutes to figure it out. People really don't care that much about what you and I may personally care about, especially to the point where they'll go lurking Mastodon. IMO Reddit is a good middle ground even though it's owned by a large company. It gives people a sense of pseudoanonymity and feeling they're in control of their subreddits, despite the fact it's still on a central collection of servers yet also gives people much more freedom to customize (?) things without having to tinker around or learn things.
Both can exist and despite the chaos around Twitter right now, I think it'll be kicking for a looooong time. Heck even Angelfire and Lycos are still around and those things predate Google and managed to survive the first dot-com bubble crash. Or have you paid attention to how many billions of dollars Zukerburg has been burning just to make a ghetto Second Life clone? Lol. Yet "Meta" is still going strong. I think Mastodon will always remain one of those niche things that, because it's open source, will always be out there but will only attract interest from certain people which is just fine (kinda like IRC, for example). If you've read Walter Benjamin's essay Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit or Max Horkheimer's Theorie der Manipulation (and even Theodor W. Adorno's own expansions), then it makes sense why this occurs. The path of less resistance and all that...it's what defines us these days. The poverty of mass culture.