I have long thought they missed their moment, but not because of this.
the whole point of Mastodon is to be a federated social network where the first choice is to choose their instance
Yes, but only nerds care about federation. consumers just want a simple straightforward onboarding experience that makes it super-easy to find, follow, and chat with their friends. If you are an inexperienced consumer just looking for a nice social media experience, how are you supposed to know what instance to choose? In a few cases it might be very obvious, eg if you love sportsball then sportsball.social is probably for you and so on. But in many cases it's not obvious, and it's even less obvious how to figure out which instances federate with which other ones and what that means for your ability to link up with other people.
Nerds need to understand that 99.995% of people do not give a shit about protocols or architectures - they just want to know does it cost money, is there an app for their phone, is it easy to use. I have 30 years of experience with distributed online communities and even I don't give a shit about federation on an emotional level.
It's clever, it's a great idea, but emotionally I don't care, in much the same way that I don't care about the fact that HN runs on ARC and so on. Where and how people hang out socially is primarily an emotional decision, both online and off. Nobody is invested in the mechanics of the social media platform unless they harbor a desire to run their own instance, which most people don't. You don't pick a bar or social club because you like their business model, you pick it because you like the atmosphere and/or because your friends already hang out there.
I think you’re being a little hyperbolic. The facts are that there’s a handful of popular servers that are easy to find, a few that seem popular in certain countries. This is all very very like email, which people don’t have trouble understanding the mental model of. And furthermore, all those popular instances federate with each other, also like email. (I assume there are a handful of politically-fringe servers which don’t federate with the mainstream, which is also not that different than email, where the few services most everyone uses won’t accept mail from any IP without an established good reputation.) this means users don’t really have to ask any questions about who federates with whom. And it doesn’t matter which instance you join so there’s no risk to picking the wrong one. Me, I picked one with a short name for ease of typing, and also picked one where I could get my 3-letter username. (Another thing that sucks about a single namespace: there’s one single “SJP” or “GOB” in the whole world with Twitter.)
So I’m saying that Mastodon’s elevator pitch is “It’s like Twitter but they have different servers, but you don’t really have to care about that because they’re all connected, like email.” That’s not on par with compiling your own Linux kernel like you’re making it out to be.
Fully agree.
I like the concept, but the concept itself produces multiple instances of any particular subject.
You have to wade through a plethora of almost the same instances and then read the moderation policy on each to find out is this is the one for you, then you have to somehow tell your friends.
the whole point of Mastodon is to be a federated social network where the first choice is to choose their instance
Yes, but only nerds care about federation. consumers just want a simple straightforward onboarding experience that makes it super-easy to find, follow, and chat with their friends. If you are an inexperienced consumer just looking for a nice social media experience, how are you supposed to know what instance to choose? In a few cases it might be very obvious, eg if you love sportsball then sportsball.social is probably for you and so on. But in many cases it's not obvious, and it's even less obvious how to figure out which instances federate with which other ones and what that means for your ability to link up with other people.
Nerds need to understand that 99.995% of people do not give a shit about protocols or architectures - they just want to know does it cost money, is there an app for their phone, is it easy to use. I have 30 years of experience with distributed online communities and even I don't give a shit about federation on an emotional level.
It's clever, it's a great idea, but emotionally I don't care, in much the same way that I don't care about the fact that HN runs on ARC and so on. Where and how people hang out socially is primarily an emotional decision, both online and off. Nobody is invested in the mechanics of the social media platform unless they harbor a desire to run their own instance, which most people don't. You don't pick a bar or social club because you like their business model, you pick it because you like the atmosphere and/or because your friends already hang out there.