And who uses mastodon? I have never heard of a single friend even mention mastodon. ever. Decentralised might be utopia for us, the hackers, the techies... centralised however is for the masses. It's simply easier for them to be where their friends are.
Mastodon is doing decent in Japan - with well over 500,000 users. Thanks to Pixiv hosting pawoo.net. But if you do not have Japanese friends then it is pretty unlikely you have friends using Mastodon - as it isn't as popular in the U.S (55k~ users). Disregarding all servers with <1,000 users.
If you have a tight knit group of friends getting everyone to swap over to Mastodon (and slowly bring their friends) isn't that difficult. That's how the social effect works whenever there's a max exodus of users from Platform A --> Platform B (like what happened with Myspace-->Facebook, Digg-->Reddit, etc.). It isn't impossible - just unlikely.
I don't remember where I first read it, but I liked this opinion: in the future, decentralization, even if only adopted by a techie minority, will serve as a threat of what could be, thus keeping the centralized powers in check.
Full technical and governance decentralization is an utopia based on computer science fundamentals. We need to start thinking about the constraints instead of just jumping to the decentralization bandwagon as if was a matter of choice.
Version control is a tool made for "us, the hackers, the techies", the ideal target population. Openness and decentralisation made git the tool it is.
GitHub is a center for activities: PRs, issues, notifications. It's only a matter of convenience. To be successful you have to create an equally (or more) convenient decentralised alternative.
Decentralized social networks could easily be for the masses. The main thing keeping people on centralized social networks instead of decentralized ones is that almost everyone else is currently on the centralized ones. That could change.
Yes, but i cannot start my own network and join others ad-hock and move around as i please. I'm in multi year contracts, heck i couldn't even transfer my number until few years ago, and it's still a pain in the ass to do so.
A hock is a joint in the lower end of a quadruped's hind leg, between the knee and fetlock. It's in analogous position to the ankle in humans.
Of course 'hock' can also mean 'to sell, especially to a pawn broker'.
The word you want is 'hoc' which is Latin for 'this'. You may be familiar with the 'post hoc' fallacy: which is that if event A is followed by event B, event B must therefore be caused by event A. The full name of the fallacy is 'post hoc, ergo propter hoc', which means 'after this, therefore because this'.
The latin word 'ad' simply mean 'to' or 'for'. So 'ad astra' means 'to the stars', an 'ad hominem' argument is to literally direct your argument 'to the person' and their faults.
So finally we arrive at the combination 'ad hoc', which means 'to the purpose'. Ad hoc things are done in purely pragmatic manner, for a particular purpose. They are often short lived arrangements which end once their purpose has been meet or is made moot.
Oh, and you didn't make this mistake, but I'm going to blather about it anyway. 'etc.' is short for 'et cetera', it is not spelled 'ect.', nor 'excetera', nor is the usage 'and etc.' valid. 'et cetera' means literally 'and the rest'--meaning anything, not necessarily just the Professor and Maryanne.
But why does it matter if a large portion of the users are leveraging a few big providers? The important aspect is that I have the ability of picking a small provider (or even starting my own) and still be able to interact with all of them.
