[firecall]

Do systems like Mastodon break the promise of Social Networks?

In practice Mastodon doesn't seem to support the ability to actually be social.

I clicked a Mastodon link on my iPhone the other other day, it opened in Safari.

I wanted to interact with the Post. But I couldn't as I wasn't logged in. So I went to login, but of course it wasn't my instance.

I'd then have needed to copy the post URL, login to my instance, and share it or do whatever you have to do in Mastodon. I moved onto other things, the process broke my flow.

The TLDR is that Mastodon creates too much friction to be actually work as a decentralised social network. My prediction is that It'll end up as another Twitter clone focused around a small number of major instances.

An OSS Twitter clone might be a good thing, but then it might not. Running a Social Network is hard.