What is the long-term potential supposed to be? Is Mastodon supposed to replace Twitter, or is it supposed to enhance the lives of people? I'm a member of several small forums that just don't grow. It's the same people each day, and that's fine. It's much closer to how human interactions work in real life. You don't join an ever-expanding pool of people where you strive to maximize your connections (or at least, I don't). Instead, you probably have a relatively small group of people that you hang out with more often.
Even then I have a small fraction of the followers from twitter than I do on mastadon and I still get way more engagement. Both in numbers and quality. It's not oldschool forums quality but it feels a lot closer.
This argument confuses “everybody hangs out with just a few people” with ”a few people hang out with a few people”. The former is a cool idea, sure, but the latter is just a description of a not-very-successful service. I mean, I like my local pub, but it isn’t HN-worthy.
Social media is valuable, that’s why people use it. It would be nice if we end up coordinating on social media that aren’t toxic or addictive. Unfortunately mastodon may not make that happen, as GP said.
> Social media is valuable, that’s why people use it.
That doesn't follow. Neither of those two statements seems self-evident.
People typically follow social media for a number of reasons and to my mind novelty and the pretense of a sense of community are the biggest one. But the latter is usually just paper thin. In "successful social media" most social interactions are either fleeting or superficial. You argue on the Internet with strangers and you pigeonhole them to fit your biases. The entire focus for social media is to drive up "engagement" because clicks and views mean more ad revenue and a bigger "audience". And as the effort of providing something genuinely interesting is a lot higher than something provocative (which has the benefit of being able to simply be an outright lie), that's where social media inevitably trends towards.
Pre-social media spaces were a lot more social in the sense of being communal: IRC chat rooms would have old guard regulars, often lurking around in case something interesting pops up; moderation would happen very bluntly and immediately to set clear house rules about what is or isn't acceptable behavior. Forums had a much lower frequency but followed similar patterns. There was a clear sense of a shared culture if you stuck around long enough and people would actually avoid hanging around in the extremely large forums or chat rooms because they were "too noisy" to have a conversation. It would usually be where you'd go to seek advice or help you couldn't find elsewhere and any follow-up would usually happen in a more confined space like DMs.
What social media has effectively done is looked at the extremely large and noisy spaces and decided that this is what everything should be like by default and then bolted on some ways to keep track of what conversations you were having while mixing the ideas of "people that seem interesting/nice" and "accounts that post interesting content", productizing and transactionalizing all social interactions. Even Mastodon is guilty of this but on the smaller instances at least the scale is limited by default.
The problem with social media being the "marketplace of ideas" is that you normally go to the market to get new things and then you go to work, go home or go to your "third place" (e.g. your peer group, your pub, your club house) where you can all show each other what you got. Social media wants to be all of those places but because the marketplace is the only part that makes money, that's all it delivers.
So a system that enables thousand if not millions of "pubs" would be HN worthy? From what I understand that is mastodon and this article is a success story of a single instance/"pub".
Twitter, for example, aimed to be a single, universal town square. Mastodon follows much closer to forums where you find yourself in smaller, potentially more tightknit communities
Both have pros and cons. I don't expect Mastodon will give people the same value as social media, but it won't have some of the downsides either. Similarly, I don't expect social media will ever be sustainable as a coordination platform without toxicity and doom scrolling.
Not being indexed by search engines is a fatal flaw in my opinion. There might be some interesting discussions taking place on Mastodon, but I would have no way of knowing.
As an analogy, there might be some interesting discussions happening at my local Community Center, or my neighbor's house, but I would have no way of knowing. But to discover these discussions, I would need to meet someone with a shared interest who would, in turn, share with me a place that they go to for continued discussions and to hang out with interesting people who share an interest.
So maybe, if done correctly, this is a feature? The good content is one extra network connection away, but easy enough to find if an advocate chooses to highlight content, share a connection, or otherwise create an inbound reference to the community.
If you had a way to search like "hey there's an interesting conversation going on at my local community center, maybe I will go and join their next session."
At the same time, does your local community center want the unfiltered public to have input to their conversations? Or are they only interested in spreading it to friends/neighbors of people already at the center?
I like the idea of it, but I also have no idea how one would find any of these cited discussions. It seems having an existing social network gives you a strong advantage. As a lurker, introvert, and ruralite, I think I'm going to be naturally disadvantaged on these types of platforms.
Or maybe I'm just misunderstanding the whole design.
Well said. It's astonishing how much the corporate/capitalist mantra "if you're not growing, you're dying" has taken hold in the world of open source and free culture. People not only fail to realize how unsustainable and destructive that idea is, many don't even seem to know that alternative community models exist, and have been practiced since forever.
