Did it grow into that with competitors that have money?

Mastodon will likely never get anyone but tech folks. And the era of tech folks being the trendsetter on the intarweb pipes is probably over.

Actually, yeah, it did have competitors with money. You ever wonder why IE and specifically IE 6 just got abandoned in stasis forever? Because like a number of other big incumbents circa early 00s, MS really thought the web was a fad. They envisioned an app ecosystem. Maybe XAML, maybe Java, maybe something else. But not these dumb little browsers.

IE 6 was abandoned because Microsoft won the browser war. It's ridiculous to say that in 2006/7 Microsoft thought web was a fad

> IE 6 was abandoned because Microsoft won the browser war.

This has never been adequate to explain how MS treated IE.

Microsoft also won the desktop decisively, arguably more decisively than the browser front. And yet far from abandoning windows, it pretty consistently iterated via major releases and service updates, even when competitors were almost rounding errors and when they had a business base that often valued backward compatibility as much or more than anything else.

Microsoft doesn't abandon things just because they achieved dominance.

IE was abandoned because MS of the early 00s still thought most computing would stay on the desktop, in network-aware applications, maybe even using different runtimes, but still desktop apps.

> It's ridiculous to say that in 2006/7 Microsoft thought web was a fad

It's ridiculous of you to choose 2006/2007 when you're responding to a comment that specifies "circa early 00s."

And yes, by 2006/2007, MS realized they'd made a mistake and the web was becoming something that could deliver experiences competitive with desktop apps.