A few generalist instances dominating the fediverse and dictating its policy doesn't sound likely? It's slowly happening right now and will only make Mastodon a slightly less centralized Facebook.

Most people don't want to link their online persona to instances with stupid names and very strange rules. So they all flock to the more generalist ones which are few and far between and have an established user base and reputation. Since generalist instances are not "cool" to administer, only a few dedicated people maintain them and they will keep being few and grow larger and larger

that sounds to me like growing pains.

i happened to find a “generalist” mastodon instance without really trying. i just read a few twitter ex-pats for awhile, to get the lay of the land, and picked one. i sent an email to the administrator, offering to donate some money, because i couldn’t find a donation link. if this one doesn’t work out, i’ll pick a different one. or run one myself!

again: your criticism sounds to me like “social media has never worked, therefore mastodon also can’t work.” i choose to believe that there is something beyond the status quo.

I didn't say generalist instances are difficult to find, on the contrary they are the most popular. What I'm saying is that there's too few of them.

> your criticism sounds to me like “social media has never worked"

There is an entire paragraph where I explain exactly what functionality could be added to Mastodon to at least make it possible to be better. In its current state I believe it's bound to develop this behavior with no way to fix it

i guess we will have to agree to disagree. i think it’s way to early to assume that. also, you titled your post “mastodon is not a good social network.” that is the very definition of pessimism, versus optimism.

I could have titled it "Mastodon is a terrible social network" but I didn't because it's not a lost cause. I provided an argument and a modest suggestion. I don't think I can do much more in my positiom.

I saw a guy on Twitter expressing how he created an instance a while ago and didn't notice anything during the recent Mastodon influx. Not a single user joined his instance.

He figured this is due to not being listed properly on some of the onboarding pages. He had tried to get on it, but failed. He then continued to collect some stats on all instances (which is difficult) and came to the conclusion that 90% of Mastodon instances have < 10 users, and most are closed/private.

If true, then yes...users will flock to a small group of large instances. Which makes sense, you want to go to where the most people are, it's the entire point of a social network.

If exponential growth continues (which I doubt), it will lead to existential problems. In costs, moderation, compliance, etc.

Looks like compliance might actually solve this ? We already have laws that kick in over a certain amount of users. Seems to be a pretty big incentive for instances to limit the number of users to accept, which would result in a lot of mid-sized instances, rather than your usual power law distribution ?

Interesting. What is the cap size?

Seems to be in 3 steps :

- older than 3 years or more than 10M€/year of revenue

- 5 million unique visitors per month

>surely we can muster a little more optimism than that.

Name one social media site and then explain how it was a net positive for society/outweighed all of it's toxic aspects.

This one.

>Name one social media site and then explain how it was a net positive for society/outweighed all of it's toxic aspects.

That isn't something one can objectively measure.

I have my own subjective opinions about social media, as does OP. OP suggested I inject positivity into mine, so I am curious to see what their subjective opinions are in an effort to perhaps shift my perspective.

i think that's asking the wrong question. i think most or all of them started off pretty good. where we went wrong is creating a system where social media sites are paid for with ads, which gives warped incentives to the owners of those sites.

in that respect, federation is the answer. take the power away from anybody who could screw it all up for us.

MySpace.

No dark-cryptic algorithms, promoted creativity in coding, design and music. You knew the people you added. Made socialising easier.

Guilty of mainstreaming social media as an idea /s

It's more like "Twitter is bad for these reasons; and mastodon copied almost all of the design that makes twitter bad"