Thoughts about Mastodon and the "new Twitter"
I keep telling myself I should stop thinking about social media so much, especially in the "current moment", but it keeps happening. This post started as a bunch of posts on Mastodon until I stopped myself and decided to Blog About It instead.
Mastodon is fine
Eugen being the BDFL of Mastodon (the project) might have been beneficial in the early days, but it feels more and more like a liability at this point.
If Mastodon is to survive for another 8 years, it cannot be run as a pet project anymore. And it also should not be run as "just" a Twitter-like anymore because Bluesky is effectively winning that battle with more resources than the Mastodon project could ever get.
A lot of the good ideas for the Fediverse aren't coming from Eugen or Mastodon at this point, and they rarely involve just "being another Twitter". Which leads me to my next point.
"Who is the new Twitter?" is a boring question
I really do not like this question.[1] This isn't me being salty about Bluesky "winning", by the way. I would be bothered the same if Mastodon was being declared a "winner" because:
Why should we have only one website, exactly?
Why is this all we care about? Why is this the focus? Why do we obsess over who has the most (active) users?
Are we constantly arguing about decentralization, who does it and who doesn't, and complaining about monopolies only to want (effectively) a monopoly for our online spaces? Really?
Sure, it's more annoying, but I think it's healthier to have different spaces for different people.
I've been on Twitter since 2009, Mastodon since 2017, and Bluesky since early 2023 and at this point, I can say that all of these are true:
- I know people who only feel comfortable being on Mastodon and not Bluesky, and vice versa.
- I know people for whom Twitter is still Their Only Place. This list gets smaller by the day and is only really there because Bluesky doesn't have locked accounts (yet), but it exists.
- ...and I know people who have withdrawn from social media altogether because the remaining options just feel terrible to them.
This is the kind of thing I think about when I see people bicker about who is "winning the Twitter-like war". I really don't care about who is winning because I do not believe it is a conflict worth thinking about.
See ya,
- damien
I also roll my eyes at the fact that, most of the time, those asking it treat Mastodon as if it only "became a thing" in November 2022. It has been around for eight years at this point! A lot of social media websites don't even last half as long! But most people didn't care until Elon Musk bought Twitter and "made it bad" (as if it were perfect before). But whatever, I'm annoyed about it, but it's just because I'm clearly not neurotypical enough to hear someone getting details/a story wrong and moving on as if it didn't happen. ↩︎
