[panic]

None of the reasons they give -- difficulty of user acquisition, conflict between security and convenience, curation, or economies of scale -- are fundamental obstacles to making a decentralized social network. Mastodon has found some success despite facing the same problems.

[albertgoeswoof]

Mastodon is not successful by any metric compared with even the smallest social networks, let alone the giants

[panic]

Where would you find these metrics? Looking at the federated timeline, I see posts appearing at a pretty fast rate (more than one per second), though most of them are in Japanese.

[dest]

It's very popular in Japan because of the "lolicon" phenomenon (cultural sexy drawings of youth people), which is not accepted by Twitter because of the occidental culture in which this is a taboo.

[albertgoeswoof]

go and ask everyone you meet in person today if they've heard of mastodon

[zemnl]

I bet that few of them will reply that it is an extinct animal, some others that it is a cool band, and most of them that they have never heard of such a thing.

[lxrbst]

Mastodon is not successful, at all. Apparently content that was not accepted on twitter, such as lolicon, has found a new home on Mastodon.

The average user would never bother to migrate to decentralized services for any other reason then necessity, lack of choice, or to escape rules/laws.

[madnerd]

Personally I like using Mastodon. There is an open source community (mostly french) that post interesting things.

A good social network shouldn't be about who has the most users, but who has the users you want to interact with.

Mastodon will probably never be the average user social network, but it works pretty well for people with specific interest, or marginalized people that doesn't want to interact with hateful people.

As for the lolicon content, it just doesn't exists except on specific instance, which are blocked on mine.

[daveid]

Reposting from Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/18213943

If you think the only reason to use a self-hosted social network is if you want to circumvent the laws, you're making the same argument as only wanting privacy if you've got something to hide. YouTube ran an algorithm to delete "extremist videos" and accidentally irreversibly deleted a bunch of historical evidence of destruction of Syrian historical sites. Shit like that happens all the time when someone else is in charge.

[lxrbst]

Didn't bother reading your link, cause that's not what I said. I was talking about the average user.

I also never said they don't have value, or that they're only there to circumvent rules or laws.

Sidenote: Loss of privacy/centralization isn't a problem to be solved, it's a reality that needs to be accepted. We lost already.

[rainbowmverse]

Define "successful." I think your definition might be more compatible with the writers of this article than that of anyone who actually uses Mastodon. What does a resident of awoo.space or witches.town (for example) care about scale relative to Twitter? They're successful at serving their niches.

[panic]

Sure, but centralized services have the same user acquisition problem. Is there something that makes decentralized services uniquely bad at getting users to switch?

[marian0_]

Decentralised services always come out years later centralised services are launched and their only raison d'etre is not having the rules of those services.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

Yeah, I still remember when the web was only a product of Web Inc., and how long it took for independent webserver implementations to take off.

Or, before then, do you still remember when email was this walled garden where everyone had an account with Electronic Messaging Solutions Inc.? It took decades until sendmail, exim, qmail, postfix, and so on came along, largely thanks to Google's help in breaking open the former monopoly, and people could finally host their own email servers!

[marian0_]

I mean the decentralised services of today, no need to write a snark response. THink XMPP, or Mastodon.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

Ah, yeah, true, I still remember the days when the walled garden or IRC was the only option around before XMPP was invented.

Are you sure you aren't just saying "those decentralized services that happen to be built as replacements for centralized services come out later than what they intend to replace"? Well, yeah, of course they do. While those that happen to be invented decentralized first come out decentralized first. Also, I think email still is a decentralized service of today? And yet, gmail seems to be going strong in centralizing email, doesn't it?!

[awalton]

> Mastodon is not successful, at all.

I don't know about your definitions, but in my playbook 800,000 users is pretty damned successful. Let me reinterpret your comment for you: "I do not want to believe Mastodon is successful, since it hurts my view."

> Apparently content that was not accepted on twitter, such as lolicon, has found a new home on Mastodon.

Unsurprising. All communities end up with some version of this problem, be it hate speech, illegal content, piracy, etc. And it can definitely be harder to police in these kinds of federated environments... but it's certainly not an unsolvable problem. People just have to want to solve it. Twitter has a huge problem with hate speech on their platform, as an example, but they've basically turned a complete blind eye to it for years and years. (And even now after they've started trying to add some support for content policing, reporting hate speech still requires far too many clicks to be reasonable, given the rate people can churn it out...)

In fact, when your platform starts to have these problems, it's usually a sign you've done something right. It means your platform is actually mature enough to abuse, unlike other platforms that failed to reach this status like Diaspora. That's not a sign to give up, it's a sign that you need to start thinking about how to solve these new problems. (And they're hard problems to solve, often coming down to jurisdictional boundaries and "default deny" policies simply because the problem is seen as too hard to fix in software. You even see Google struggling to solve these problems - e.g. on YouTube it's still common that they ban content erroneously, claiming it to be extremist or whatnot.)

> The average user would never bother to migrate to decentralized services for any other reason then necessity, lack of choice, or to escape rules/laws.

Or you know, because they want to. There are plenty of reasons to leave Twitter behind: It's adding bloat that hardly any of the users care about, with yawn inducing, bandwidth destroying live video, infuriating autoplaying video, and "moments". It continues to pollute feeds with garbage from other users with no way to filter it (like "[so and so liked this]" - good for them, but this isn't Facebook...). And now they're even messing with chronology, so you get messages from hours in the past appearing at the top of your feed instead of up-to-the-minute content that you'd expect. (And my personal favorite anti-feature, the "you have location tracking disabled, we will not track your location" location-tracking sidebar filled with location-specific content.)

Looking at all of those downsides, then comparing with Mastodon which doesn't have any of those problems, supporting large messages, spoiler tags/content-under-the-fold, having decent Android clients, and decent, growing communities, and, well... it's really quite a compelling platform for me.

[lxrbst]

> "I do not want to believe Mastodon is successful, since it hurts my view."

What? I like Mastodon, it just doesn't have any people from the circles I follow on Twitter. I don't think the average user (who I was talking about btw) who follows mainstream celebrities does either.

Anyway I didn't bother reading the rest of your post, seems like you're coming from a place of anger.