[rvz]

They should have left years ago, rather than tolerate the decades of sewage and outrage around the platform. The problem is some think the solution is to replace it with a 'federated' outrage machine (Mastodon) which discoverability is an eternal problem with instance moderators banning entire instances for any reason if they wanted to. For the example of journa.host [0].

The same can easily happen for a Mastodon instance for academics. The whole point of Mastodon is to own and self-host your own instance. If these journalists, academics, artists, etc are still not able to do that and are joining centralized instances; it is no better than being on a worse version of Twitter, but with a significantly limited reach and not truly owning your accounts.

It is fine to believe the delusion that Twitter will immediately be falling over 'any minute now'™ for 100% of users. But if I had to choose where to focus advertising my work on either Mastodon or Twitter it will always be Twitter; both before and after Elon taking over. The reality of the point is, there is still no viable alternative to Twitter that has the same reach and features that make it convenient for many to use.

But this time round, the ToS applies to everyone equally, scam bots are invisible in replies, normal bots are labelled as automated and tells you who owns it and much more. The exact opposite of what I have heard from the 'doomsters' and the screaming minority spreading misinformation about a so-called 'Twitter apocalypse'.

[0] https://twitter.com/ajaromano/status/1594432548222152705

[N1ckFG]

Mastodon's at the "email in 1994" stage--the general public is starting to become aware that it exists, and folks who were running small servers for their own purposes suddenly find themselves in a position to earn social capital by handing out accounts. Obviously in a few years at most, this will get tedious for the admins providing all that undercompensated labor. I think the winning scenario will be old-school webhosts including a personal Mastodon instance with their default package, like email. If that happens, Big Tech adoption will follow and we're quickly talking about a real standard with a lifespan of decades, if not more