this post was submitted on 01 May 2023
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Good post. On the other hand, IMHO (as a non-Fedi-expert I should say), I think the Fediverse does not absolutely need to appeal to everyone. A lot of people are happy with Twitter, and a lot of people are happy with Facebook. Evolving Mastodon into a clone of Twitter is perhaps missing the point of building a different platform in the first place. Not to say there's no place for new ideas or criticism of course...
To add after reading the post again: A centralized social media site with a professional content moderation team is, of course, always going to provide a better experience to new users. I don't think a decentralized platform will ever be able to compete, by design. "Full text search" and "quote posts" are not going to help when someone accidentally joins a poorly moderated instance.
I completely agree. The goal for the Fediverse is to be sustainable. There's no point worrying that it's not growing as fast as commercial networks, or that it doesn't have the same mainstream penetration, or whatever it is people worry about. The only thing that really matters is that there are enough people to develop platforms and enough users to produce interesting content. This is already the case today, and things will only be getting better going forward as the Fediverse grows.
Maybe Bluesky will get more popular than the entire Fediverse and attract a huge number of users, and maybe it won't. However, I can guarantee that the Fediverse will be around long after everyone forgot what Bluesky was.
I agree. I hate Twitter but really enjoy Mastodon, because of the people and content it draws (at least what I see).
I want the Fediverse to walk a fine line between providing a platform that interests a niche group without gatekeeping and which sustains enough interest to sustain itself.
I respectfully disagree with some of your points. The benefit of a Twitter clone that is federated (or more precisely, a Twitter clone that supports activityPub) is that the users of said Twitter clone can see content from and interact with users who aren't on said clone, but another platform that supports activityPub. And conversely, I can see content from said Twitter clone without necessarily having to be on it, as long as I use some activityPub platform that fits my taste.
This provides a lot more choices. I can choose a platform with the best user experience for my taste, without any regard to privacy and moderation. That would be completely fine. Conversely, another person may choose to search for an instance based on their specific moderation, topics, privacy, or other preferences. Another person may even self host their own instance. All of those can interact with each other, and that is what makes it nice.
Sure. I'm a big fan of federation. However, I switched to Mastodon (the ActivityPub application) because I liked its style better than Twitter. Turning Mastodon into Twitter to attract a larger audience and placate the complainers isn't necessarily what everyone wants. Just my personal view on this. But it honestly doesn't bother me that much.
The signup/moderation issue feels somewhat similar. Yeah, it would be way more Twitter-like if signup defaulted to Mastodon.social and that mega-instance hired a content moderation team to rival a professional social media site. But that's not quite what I think is currently good about Mastodon and Fedi...
On that part, I do agree with you. I do not like mastodon just because I'm not a huge fan of the micro-blogging-focused user experience, but I do agree that there's value in a platform not imitating Twitter but having some of the UX. Likewise, I think that there is value in another platform that would attract Twitter users. I think it could just be a separate mastodon instance that is modified to fit said user base.