> For now, I’ll just say that while I fully understand why everyone wants Mastodon to be the new Twitter. Or the better Twitter. The more ideal Twitter. Or whatever. It’s just not going to happen. Mastodon brought a protocol to a product fight. Maybe Ivory or another client can iron out some of the product jank, but the protocol element — the power that so many want to believe in — is what is going to keep holding the product element back, would be my prediction.

The "fight" as you call it is far from over, and without the protocol, product-focused activities will run out of funds before they reach critical adoption. Twitter just happened to get lucky and reach sufficient size that investors have continued to be patient and hopeful despite the indications that it can never become steadily profitable. They would have eventually awakened, but now that the main investor is a single individual whose wealth is quickly eroding, the cuts and schemes we've seen are just the beginning of the attempts to cut costs and generate revenue. The hope for the future is that protocols produce sufficient uptake across diverse products to sustain a network.

> Anyone who has been around long enough has seen this play out far too many times. Elon has created a new opening here for a new way, without question. But I have yet to see a product, including Post News and the others, that actually answer the call. A product call. Not a protocol.

If you think about it, the smoothness you like about Twitter wasn't there in the beginning ... or for a number of years afterward. Twitter was full of sharp edges and corners, and it only became pleasant as people independently developed client software. When Twitter felt that its site and its own apps were pleasant enough, they restricted their API and killed off most of the client ecosystem. And the site (I haven't used their apps, so I cannot comment) is still unpleasant to use, though they did buy #Tweetdeck, where the most irritating parts are suppressed.

I mean, you are welcome to pretend that you know what you're talking about and to praise Twitter the product over the Fediverse protocols ... and over products such as Post News. But when the end comes, and it will, where are you going to go? You had better be trying out all the different corpocentric "products", so you'll know which product meets your needs.

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