I hope it doesn't. Because it essentially sets us up for a repeat. If Mastodon was 'just not the thing people were looking for' then at least it solves the problems that both Twitter and Substack have, which is that they are not federated. Better to fix Mastodon than to waste another decade on something that will ultimately blow up and with the way Substack has - in my head at least - been associated negatively with crap content it will probably be sooner rather than later.
Unfortunately, this perspective seems very head-in-a-bubble to me. It's a tiny tiny number of people who think the problem with Twitter and Substack is that they aren't federated. Federation isn't a feature people broadly care about. If it makes the platform work better, great! But I don't think that's the case for Mastodon or any other federated platform I've come across. It's the opposite, they make concessions on the experience in order to support federation. That would be ok if those sacrifices were for functionality people really want, but federation just ... isn't that.
I disagree. Federation is a feature people want, but they don't know about the concept.
When I show people that I can talk to Signal, WhatsApp, and Signal through a single app, they're pretty impressed. I wouldn't expect most people to set up a Matrix bridging system like I did, same with most Mastodon servers, but it's a feature people do generally want.
With Mastodon, most people first ask "but how do I follow people on Twitter", which often leads to pointing at bridges that may stop working at any point and have no official status, and often get blocked on small servers because of the overwhelming wave of moderation spam they cause.
Phone manufacturers back in the day used to have quite commonly used "social hub" apps that would combine various social media sources into a single UI, but they were all tied to their own brand that either got too difficult to maintain or lost the phone wars (HTC and Blackberry had quite well-received integrations if I recall).
The past years we've been stuck with a locked in ecosystem for so long that the mere idea of two different apps interoperating has become inconceivable to the mainstream.
I hope the DMA, which will force messenger apps to interoperate, will bring back the knowledge that it's possible to do so at the very least.
> I disagree. Federation is a feature people want, but they don't know about the concept.
I think they want it, but by an order of magnitude more, they want simple UX. Everything else is a distant second. UX is the foundation upon which everything else is built. Without an excellent UX, the audience will forever remain niche. I tried to just sign up to Mastodon, and it was a clusterfuck of proportions so unbelievable that I can't believe it has as many users as it does - and it only has a couple million users.
Federation is someone doing a cool card trick at a cocktail party. Does it look cool? Yes. Is anyone going to go out and buy a deck of cards the next morning and learn how to do it? No.
Federation is the core of the internet and that has taken off, so sure they do. Email and phone numbers took off, isolated ISPs all died out.
We're getting some form of federation of messengers and other technology companies deemed "gatekeepers" by the EU. Companies serving large user bases won't have a choice, so there's no need to go out am buy anything.
I think this has "because" and "despite" flipped. The internet took off despite federation, because it let people do things they couldn't otherwise do.
But reinventing something that everyone can already do (eg. tweeting) with federation is not a winning game.
Mastodon is never going to take off. I’ve been building SaaS applications for 15 years. I don’t think you understand the very low level of complexity required for mass adoption. Let’s just look at the signup process for a few minutes, using the UX convention of actions.
Twitter:
1. Search for Twitter.
2. Click on the first link.
3. Click sign up.
Mastodon:
1. Search for Mastodon.
2. Click the first link: mastodon.social.
3. Click create account.
4. Message modal pops up alerting the user that it is currently impossible to sign up to mastodon.social. But don’t worry, you can sign up on another server by clicking “Find another server.” At this point I’m confused. Why are there different servers? Will my friends be on the other server? Do we need to sign up on the same server? No explanation. I click the link.
5. Long page of options. No indication of quality or why I should choose one server over another. Now I am in choice paralysis. I click the first option (which has an anime figure on it). Surely - surely - the first option is the best option. The suggested option by whoever is running this application.
6. I land on a Korean language portal and I am done. I’m never coming back. Mastodon is dead to me. Forever.
You might think this is hyperbole, but I promise you it is not. I’ve been in charge of A/B testing and UX centric development for web applications just like this for a very long time. Mastodon’s sign up process is easily one of the worst I have ever seen. Not a single UX person has been involved in the creation of this protocol.
The fact Mastodon sites don't even load without JS is absurd, a huge not-talked-about barrier to entry (globally), and a betrayal of its "protocol-first" talking points.
Until that changes Mastodon isn't trying to be a serious player.
Because Mastodon has an open API, you don't need to use the official Mastodon web client. Twitter upset a lot of users when it limited access to its API because many alternative Twitter clients were rendered useless.
Twitter definitely does not load without loading several megabytes of Javascript. Nitter.net is a quick and easy substitute that loads instantly without it, though some video playback still requires Javascript (HLS video).
I can't do any objective measurements but there's a clear impact in battery life while browsing with Javascript disabled. The entire web becomes snappier and loading times instantly drop.
Doing so also breaks all web applications (and web applications posing as websites, i.e. React rendering) so it's not something I turn on permanently. I usually only disable JS when my phone is running low and I'm not near a charger, or when I'm trying to read something and the terrible website hijacks scrolls/taps/somehow makes my phone run hot doing stuff in the background.
