End Of Year Open Tab Bankruptcy Roundup Jamboree, Part 1: Mastodon
I’m declaring bankruptcy on my open tabs; these are all things I’ve had open on my laptop or phone over the last several months, thinking “I should send this to someone? Or Is this a blog post?” Turns out the answer is ‘no’ to both of those, so here they are. Day 1: The Twitter to Mastodon migration, or lack thereof.
I was going do to a whole piece on mastodon last summer. At first, the second half of what became What was happening: Twitter, 2006-2023 was going to be a roundup of alternatives and why none of them were replacements for what I missed, then that got demoted to a bunch of footnotes, then it’s own thing, but I just can’t be bothered because the moment was lost.
The short, short version is that from the end of ’21 and through the first half of ’22 there was an really intersting moment where we could have built an open alternative to twitter. Instead, they built another space space for white male nerds, and the internet didn’t need one more of those.
Mastodon somehow manges to embody every flaw of open source projects: they brought a protocol to a product fight, no one’s even thinking about it as a product, misfeatures dressed up as virtue, and a weirdly hostile userbase that’s too busy patting each other on the back to noice who’s been left out. A whole bunch of gatekeeping bullshit dressed up as faux-libertarian morality. Mixed with this very irritating evangelistic true-believer vibe where Mastodon is the “morally correct” one to use, so there’s no reason to listen to reasons why people don’t use it, because axiomatically, they must be wrong.
And look, this is coming from a guy with an active subscription to Ivory. But the communities on twitter I cared about just aren’t there. They went elsewhere, or just dispersed into the web. I understand that there are people who found what they had on twitter on mastodon, and as before I can only quote former-President Beeblebrox: “Zowee, here we are at the End of the Universe and you haven't even lived yet. Did you miss out.”
One of the key works of our time is that episode of 30 Rock where Liz Lemon realizes that actually, she was the bully in high school. Mastodon was built entirely by people that never had that realization.
Michael Tsai - Blog - Why Has Mastodon Adoption Stalled?
jwz: Mastodon stampede Pretty great comment thread on this one, including this amazing line, re the mastodon developers:
And for this it’s a general Stallman problem. “I don’t understand this. Therefore you are wrong.”
The nerd rage respones to jwz’s entirely reasonable (and positive!) critique is everything you need to know. I’ve got enough weird HOA scolds in my real life without going on Al Gore’s internet and seeking them out.
Drivers of social influence in the Twitter migration to Mastodon | Scientific Reports
(I could have sworn I had more open tabs here, but I think I’m remembering frustrated twitter threads instead)