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
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.