The internet and a social network are two different things.

The internet doesn’t necessarily need everyone to be on it to be successful.

The whole point of a social network is that the majority of people are on it. That’s why Facebook is still successful despite being an absolute dump.

I don’t care about the technicalities, open source, etc (and I say that as a software engineer). I care about being able to lookup the person I just met at the bar and add/follow them. Until Mastodon can achieve that, I won’t care about it.

The large majority of people aren't on Twitter, FWIW. Every social media platform except possibly Facebook is globally niche, and most are locally niche too.

Twitter isn't niche when it comes to what matters the most for their platform: having all the most important attention getting users on there. It's dominant. Even Instagram doesn't have what Twitter does on that front.

Twitter has an immense collection of people that particularly matter in their given field, interesting famous people, and so on: celebrities, journalists, media personalities, musicians, authors, politicians, athletes, techies, companies, bankers, VCs, CEOs, entrepreneurs, famous bloggers and gamers, fashion people, etc.

Twitter has an extremely dense, active collection of those people. You can say that you don't personally care about that, however the majority of people very clearly do (and always will).

I don't think the majority of people care, most people don't follow twitter, they might have a user but they don't use it that much. In many non anglo parts of the world most of the conversation is in whatsapp groups which is part of facebook and telegram

"You say problem, I say advantage."

- What are you aiming for then? What is the whole point of that "elevator pitch" if not getting more attention for and grow it so it's not that niche anymore?

> What is the whole point of that "elevator pitch" if not getting more attention for and grow it so it's not that niche anymore?

I think the idea is that they want to use their unique design to grow lots more niches, not make any one niche bigger.

If Twitter is like Times Square, Mastodon is like Kansas City's town square. Mastodon's plan seems not to grow Kansas City into a Times Square sized competitor -- their plan seems to be to grow 1,000 more new-but-different Kansas City sized town squares.

At least, that's the impression I'm getting from reading the third and fourth header's paragraphs.

That is probably true in general. It certainly is true for some social networks. It is absolutely not true for Twitter. Twitter is supposed to be the "massive public square" of social networks. There are plenty of other social networks for interacting with specific and well defined groups of people. Twitter is for interacting with the world at large. If you want to replace Twitter you need a way to get the world at large to use your platform.

The problem is that there's a catch-22. Mastodon is actively trying to get more users when more users will inevitably mean a worse community.

Sidestep. That profile Pic (gif) made me have to read that post three times.

`We're sorry, but something went wrong on our end.`

Reloaded.

Ah, there it is.