mastodon.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit

Administered by:

Server stats:

366K
active users

Today, someone said, "Decentralized social media is a failure because technology like IRC lacks marketshare."

Sorry, stop the bus!

Why is marketshare the key metric here -- and not persistence and longevity?

I've been using IRC for nearly 30 years. It still works.

How long will WhatsApp work? I don't know -- only for as long as WhatsApp serves Meta's bottom line.

If we measure by persistence and longevity, IRC is a huge success!

From a user perspective, why does marketshare matter?

It mostly doesn't.

Obviously, size of network effect matters, but that's not the same as marketshare.

Even considering size of network effect, what's more important is *who* is using the network.

What matters most is whether a tool allows me to talk to the people I'm wanting to reach.

If a social media service only has 10 users but each of those 10 users affects my life in monumental ways, I will use it regardless of marketshare.

Yes, proprietary social media has marketshare. We agree on that. But here's my question.

Between Twitter, post.news, and the Fediverse -- which of these services is going to have the most persistence and longevity?

I don't know if Twitter's going to be available tomorrow. They could be removed from the Apple app store tomorrow.

Post.news is very likely to become the next Color or Ello or Parler.

The Fediverse? Yeah, it will be here for decades.

Chris Trottier

Facebook has 2.5 billion active users.

Twitter has 340 million active users.

Regardless of network effect, I use neither of those services (for wildly different reasons).

Thus, if someone *really* wants to talk to me on social media -- and it's absolutely critical -- they will probably need a Fediverse account.

As far as I'm concerned, I don't care how many people use Facebook or Twitter.

What I care about is what I can use indefinitely.

I acknowledge that I'm an atypical social media user. What I value in a social network is wildly different from most people.

My motive isn't to talk to everyone.

What actually motivates me is the ability to:

1. Own my personal data
2. Run my own services
3. Build my own tools
4. Define my personal space
5. Say things in a transparent environment

Neither Twitter nor Facebook can give me those things -- hence why I'm here on the Fediverse.

When considering *my* reasons for using social media -- not necessarily yours -- it should be obvious why I prefer the Fediverse over Twitter.

I cannot exist on Twitter, but I can exist on the Fediverse.

It doesn't matter if I can talk to everyone. The fact is that I can talk.

And not only talk, but talk indefinitely 🙂

@atomicpoet
yeah, i must be typical, because none of those things matter to me. to me, life, and social media by extension, are an excuse to get to know people (and dogs,. i love dogs, maybe more than i love people), and exchange stories. we have a saying in our family, if you got a story out of the experience, you got all that mattered

@AnthonyUplandpoetWatkins Yep, and I don't care if people know me. I don't care if people talk to me. I don't even care if you acknowledge my existence.

All I want is to exist, to create, and to send stuff into the ether.

@atomicpoet btw, i notice you are at about 8500 followers and i am at under 60, so i guess you are doing something right:)

@AnthonyUplandpoetWatkins I'll let you in on a secret. If I had 0 followers, I'd do the same thing.

@atomicpoet yeah, but nobody would know about it. of course, the funny thing i figured out after writing poetry for nearly 60 years is i dont write poetry for other people to read, though i am quite happy if they do, but in the moment of writing, i dont care if anyone reads it, i dont even care if i like my own poem, i write because the poem requires itself to be written and i am the nearest poet to do it.
not sure how close that is to your creative space, but it is mine. as weird as it sounds

@AnthonyUplandpoetWatkins So consider: 1 year ago, I had 15 followers. I wrote about exactly the same thing I wrote about now. Most of the time, nobody talked to me, and if I got a response back -- hey cool, another human exists!

And now a lot of people follow me. For what reason, I don't know.

People talk back. For what reasons, I don't know.

I'm just going to talk because this is where I sort out my thoughts.

@atomicpoet sounds good, take care, this old man is going to try to finish his sleep before time to go to work in the morning, if you can call driving around and taking pictures work....

@atomicpoet I wrestle with this sort of thing from time to time.

I'd do what I do without followers, thanks to my intrinsic motivations.

But then again I don't post to my blog much in recent years because I don't get much interaction there these days. I still write, but I don't post it much of anywhere.

Not chasing lots of followers, but still looking for a bit of interchange with shared things

@atomicpoet Facebook felt this way at the beginning. It provided me with more visibility to distant friends and a better chance to speak to them than I had without it. But we were young and naive and didn't think about data ownership and now we drown in advertising and lose friends to the algorithm.

Twitter let me hear from people whose voices I wanted to hear, but only, it seems, temporarily.

Now on Mastadon I have already had more meaningful 2-way conversations with people I want to hear from than I ever did on Twitter. I haven't yet found my IRL friends here yet, so that's a remaining hole.

@atomicpoet This this this. Even if you care about market share, it all means nothing if the future market share is 0. Remember friendster? I don't

@atomicpoet I’m on day two of being on Mastadon and already I’m seeing real conversations which is awesome. I hope more people and companies move over. @revk is AA on here yet?

@atomicpoet ok, not sure i follow your logic, but i respect your right to it.