>> You know the reason why people prefer reading
>> the New York Times instead of checkout-counter
>> tabloids?
I'm not actually sure that's true. Upon a cursory check, People Magazine has a slightly greater circulation than NYT. Heck, a non-trivial number people on YouTube have greater circulation than NYT or mainstream TV News channels and shows, while filming their stuff in the living room of their apartment.
McDonalds serves more customers than a five star restaurant, but that doesn't mean the restaurant is a bad investment or won't be able to turn a profit.
You're talking about different target audiences. The question isn't whether or not Mastadon completely kills Twitter and literally everyone moves over - it's whether there's a compelling reason for a significant number of people to switch over. Is it viable to for Mastadon to become a Twitter alternative with a broad level of adoption?
What people bring up over and over on every one of these articles is, "Oh, the project is doomed because why would any normal person switch over? You're only ever going to have the idealistic tech people on it, and it'll die as soon as they lose interest."
But it turns out that quality has a wide mainstream appeal, and it is a valid strategy to compete with other businesses purely on the basis of "our content is better." If Mastadon grows to the point where it has a similarly sized (albeit slightly smaller) userbase than Twitter and then stalls out, I don't any of what I said above would be invalidated. ;) Quite the opposite.
Sure, but you did not narrow down the audience. People as a whole, it would seem, slightly prefer checkout counter magazines as opposed to NYT. Likewise, I'm not sure bite-sized bullshit regurgitation services like Twitter/Mastodon are even useful in the first place, let alone benefit from refined moderation.
