Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦
It's been eight years to the day since Lance Ulanoff, the storied Tech and Social Media Expert and an award-winning tech journalist, decided that Mastodon won't survive because William Shatner couldn't find him on here.
Eight years on, Mastodon stubbornly survives:
https://rys.io/en/177.html
Please join me in celebrating the annual Mastodon Won't Survive Day, right here on fedi. :blobcatcoffee:
🧵
Polychrome :blabcat:
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦
This is not to say everything is honky-dory and our job here is done.
There are loads of things Mastodon-the-software-project needs fixed or implemented, there are loads of things other fedi software projects need.
And there is still the cultural problem of racism on fedi that drives Black and Brown people away. :blobpensive:
But all of this is fixable, and we all have agency here, in ways a VC-funded walled-garden ripe for enshittification is not.
So we have that going for us.
6/🧵/end
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦
Because fedi is not VC-backed, it does not need to generate hockey stick growth, and it is not going to end up under immense pressure to enshittify when early investors start demanding their payouts.
Because it is decentralized, it can try all sorts of things all at once. You want shorter posts? Or longer posts? Or an experience focused on photos? Or short videos? You want quote posts, or do not want them?
There's an instance for that™.
5/🧵
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦
Peach fizzled out because it was trying to replicate the monopoly-based walled-garden business model of already existing social networks.
The problem is: that space is already overcrowded. To really have a shot at that, one would need resources comparable to the resources of the biggest players in that space. And even if you do have such resources, this might still not be enough – as the fate of Google+ illustrates.
Fedi is playing a different game; decentralization is a superpower.
4/🧵
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦
I will probably never get tired of having a hearty laugh on Mastodon Won't Survive Day.
Ulanoff's piece is such a great example of "tech bubble journalism" – where anything that does not fit in the round hole of Silicon Valley VC-fueled business models must necessarily be outside of the realm of possibility (and imagination).
Not only he completely ignores the existence of broader fedi, but he also compares Mastodon to Peach – a centralized social network that quickly fizzled out.
3/🧵
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦
As it happens, one of the oldest Mastodon instances – octodon dot social – is going to close down very soon.
This is a sad milestone, but it also shows the resilience of the broader network – people migrated, and relations remain.
That tiny volunteer-run instance survived longer than Google+ – a gigantic behemoth of a social network, backed by one of the largest tech companies in the world, and pushed down on everyone and their dog through mandatory integration with YouTube.
2/🧵
moggie
You're not that likely to see it unless you are a target of it (or you help run an instance), because most of it occurs in DMs or as replies to specific people. It's commonplace for different groups of people to have extremely different experiences on Mastodon, and for those experiences to be largely invisible to others, just because of the way the core systems work.
So absolutely believe people who tell you they've been subjected to racist harassment, even if you have never seen that.
Wojsław Brożyna 🌞🌲🏴
@rysiek racism on fedi?! I thought that this is the last space, where racism could appear...
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