Slipping back into Mastodon to see how things are progressing. Continued discussions about randos building new instances should be cause for concern. This thing will become so fractured...
@LanceUlanoff I feel like you'd get a lot more out of mastodon if you'd toot about something other than how mastodon will fail
@blackle I honestly don't see how all these instances can survive. If they ever want consumers to join, they have to keep it dead simple. Choosing instances is not the way. Unless they only want this to be another BBS or IRC. Consumers will ignore and this will be a little chat room haven (with better tools than old IRS or current Reddit).
@LanceUlanoff ???? customers??? I think you're thinking about mastodon as a business vying for market share, it's really a collection of interacting forums. we never even asked for this level of popularity
@LanceUlanoff also, this being another BBS or IRC sounds exactly like our goals, tbqh
you got it in your head that mastodon _wants_ to kill twitter and I have no idea why
@LanceUlanoff isnt it already. How long til people lost interest??
@LanceUlanoff who are you
@milk Just a guy who cares about tech.
@LanceUlanoff Can you define "care"? It's not a good look when you are just doomsaying to a community that is happily tooting along. Do you just want to be right or are you proposing a solution?
@jacoby Consolidate immediately.
@LanceUlanoff I know it's your job and all but most of us on here are not interacting because of that.
I thought the whole point of a federated social platform like Mastodon is that anybody who wants to can fire up their own instance, @LanceUlanoff. If you want Twitter, you know where to find it, but your concern trolling about Mastodon reminds me of people claiming that GNU/Linux would never succeed because any rando or their cat could create their own distro.
Linux hasn't gone away, and I doubt Mastodon will either. Unless the band sues over the name.
@starbreaker Linux is the perfect analogy. It survives, but it was once positioned to take on Windows and Mac OS. That never happened for almost the exact same reason that Mastodon's growth will be limited. Instances=Distros. P.S. I run Unbuntu at home.
@LanceUlanoff you mean like hotmail being fractured from outlook.com fractured from aol.com fractured from gmail.com fractured from my.isp.com ... Still think you've missed the point there son..
@Toxic_Flange This. Is. Not. Email!
@LanceUlanoff What is it? In your opinion..
@Toxic_Flange Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo mail. Email is the digital version of snail mail. Missives between two points. Bulk email to a group. It supports conversation that's at best, two-party and struggles with group messages. It's NOT public. It's not aggregated. I
@LanceUlanoff Can't help myself! You are living a sheltered online life for one such as aged as yourself.
E-mail lists? Gnu Mailman, ListServ, majordomo? Very public, and aggregated. seclists.org?
All built on email, that serve the same or similar function of the mastodon software.
http://seclists.org/bugtraq/
@LanceUlanoff Also you never said what you think it acutally IS, just what it isn't. "Its not a pineapple!" 🍍
@Toxic_Flange It's a private/personal communication platform.
@LanceUlanoff Hoo boy... 🍿
@LanceUlanoff Do you consider email a private/personal communication platform? Twitter? Google anything? Facebook?
@Toxic_Flange Anyone who thinks email and Twitter are the same (outside of DMs, obv), is never going to listen to reason. 😀
@LanceUlanoff Whoa there, what am I, anti-vaxxer, flat earther? As a good scientist should be, conclusions and positions should be flexible and based on factual evidence, so lets lay some facts out here, like a good journo should eh?
So the one thing in debate here is private/personal comm platform. What criteria needs to be met to be called that?
@LanceUlanoff @Toxic_Flange While Twitter & email aren't the same, I think Mastodon is to Twitter as what SMTP was to email. It's the next evolution that's required for this medium to flourish.
People manage to find each other's email. People also have, in particular people who are brands, home pages under their own domains. People manage to find and follow those.
This is no different, apart from the tooling in place to follow conversations across domains.
@LanceUlanoff You're wrong. Mastodon's strength is that it's a network of small communities with their own norms. It won't replace Twitter, but will provide a smaller, human-scale alternative.
https://www.sanspoint.com/archives/2017/04/07/mastodon-a-different-way-to-think-about-social-media/
@LanceUlanoff Yes, it will become fractured. Social media is fractured (Pinterest, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and all their wannabe competitors). The blogosphere is fractured. The newsphere is fractured. "Fractured" is not exactly something to worry about on the Internet. That's the whole point of the Internet.
@LanceUlanoff :wave: Isn't that part of the goal though?