I think it'd be great for more decentralized platforms to supplant centralized ones, but they usually seem to struggle to acquire more mainstream users. Even if Twitter collapses under Musk's leadership, my hunch is that a (new?) centralized competitor is more likely to take most of their market share, rather than Mastodon.
I know, I know, there's some obvious exceptions like email, or just the web in general, but it seems like usually decentralized platforms are at a disadvantage in terms of marketing to new users, explaining how they work, and the whole onboarding experience. The very fact that they can work in different ways to different people seems like a minus in terms of getting into the public consciousness.
Email isn’t really an exception - it’s largely another federated system failure with most users on one centralized system (gmail).
You can’t even run an email server yourself without getting blacklisted these days. I doubt Twitter is going anywhere, I’m not even sure it can be replaced, it’s an unusual niche product of its time and network.
Mastodon doesn’t solve the underlying problems that lead to centralization either so most users end up on one server. Back to the same issues, except the experience is also worse than a competent centralized system.
To solve this for real you have to solve spam (need IDs), there can’t be a distinction between a user account and a server, and the server needs to be trivial to run and manage with automatic updates.
The reason why this happened is instructive. Fighting spam is really hard and the best way to do it is to be good at machine learning and to have access to a good percentage of worldwide mail, unencrypted.
Since there's no reason to think that Mastodon is immune to the spam issue, this strongly suggests that whatever replaces Twitter will quickly consolidate to a single dominant player, or perhaps a handful. Or it could collapse under the spam issue like Usenet did.
I know, I know, there's some obvious exceptions like email, or just the web in general, but it seems like usually decentralized platforms are at a disadvantage in terms of marketing to new users, explaining how they work, and the whole onboarding experience. The very fact that they can work in different ways to different people seems like a minus in terms of getting into the public consciousness.