| I think viable alternates to Facebook/Twitter have less to do with the underlying technology and
are more about attracting audiences not served by these social networks. Hence I think the next viable alternative to twitter/Facebook will probably be a centeralized one that caters to multiple niche communities. Mastodon was released in October 2016, it currently has about 800k users spread across 2000+ servers. Currently the maintainer of mastodon gets ~$2800 from Patreon to host one of the main #mastodon servers & work on the project. Mastodon is kind of like Wordpress for niche communities who want a twitter like experience outside of twitter for 1 reason or other. Right now one of the biggest use cases for mastodon is lolicon in Japan. Here is how much it costs to host your own instance: https://masto.host/ Let’s contrast mastodon with gab. Gab (centralized) was launched August 2016 has about ~270k users, 3,000+ customers and it just raised $1m. It also gets mainstream media recognition. The main use case for gab is people with political views that were booted off of twitter. Aka free speech. Right now gabs community is not really my cup of tea but I can see why you would use it. I think something like gab has more of a chance of going mainstream by collecting fringe communities effected by stuff like the adpocalypss than mastodon does. I think his mainly because of the problems around federated identity. A good critique of this can be read here: https://medium.com/m/global-identity?redirectUrl=https://hac... |