Prediction: Mastodon will likely outlast Twitter.
Historically, decentralized, open-source platforms and protocols with any adoption run forever, even if they rarely reach the popularity or cultural relevance of centralized platforms.
It seems likely to me that when Twitter eventually shuts down, people will still be running Mastodon instances.
Did you know Diaspora has 328 active nodes and 17k users? Hell, there are 3,652 active FidoNet nodes, and that started in 1984!
So... am I wrong?
@andybaio You are not wrong, though I think most of the chatter (however inane) about Mastodon: Twitter Killer Or Flash In The Pan? isn't really engaging with that question. For folks orienting Mastodon as the latest entrant in an all-or-nothing corporate tech rivalry, "it's got basic legs and people will keep using it because it's nice" isn't one of the narrative paths on the table.
@joshmillard @andybaio email cyclically gets press as "the next big thing that's always been here," most recently in the form of newsletters and before that political fundraising.
Um Slack and Google Wave? @joshmillard @andybaio
@Danhon @joshmillard what about 'em
Oh wait, I misunderstood. @andybaio @joshmillard
@joshmillard Agreed. The tech press is all about the zero-sum game. Makes for a better story.
@andybaio @joshmillard this is the real story about mastodon, not the false competition between Twitter and mastodon
@andybaio @joshmillard @Samizdata Heck, I saw some press lately about gopher makin' a comeback.
@jfm @andybaio @joshmillard There's a lovely gopher plugin for Firefox called Overbite that is still being actively developed.
@andybaio I mean, shit, email is enormously successful and has a tremendous installed user base and is the least sexy thing in the world that nobody is ever going to put up against a newer tech as a narrative combatant. When was the last time email was in its own right even any sort of news? Launch of Gmail? Eventually it's just fish saying "what's water", just a band that's perfectly good and never breaks up but never hits the top 40 charts.