Jan 5
Mastodon’t
It’s not the next Twitter.
Mastodon has been touted as a Twitter alternative.
I visited the Mastodon website. I downloaded the app. I signed up. Then, uh, hmm… which community do I want to be a part of? All of them? None of them? My own? Local? Global?
In the end, I reached decision fatigue and just left the sign up process.
It seems like a product like Twitter should be nutty simple to implement. The half that left Twitter could run and grow another one. Most of what Twitter had was users and goodwill, not necessarily a complicated platform with many features.
Maybe Substack or even Medium will step up and offer a Twitter like capability that could serve as a replacement. However, Mastodon seems to not really fit this capability, at least as a general broadcast and social platform. However, there still might be a place for it.
Mastodon might make it easier for small communities to create their own closed social networks, similar to Ning. It might help companies broadcast. Maybe it can be integrated with Web 3.0 and have a decentralized, always remembering service. However, it needs to make it much easier to adopt and onboard if it’s to have the same appeal as Twitter did.
Right now, it looks like Twitter is still the only Twitter.
