Tech “journalists” have no idea how to speak about Mastodon or the fediverse.
They seem to think that unless something has billions of users, it’s dead. They can’t even comprehend how people could prefer a smaller more selective userbase
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Many "tech journalists" are about as old as Facebook.
When they started using devices, the iPhone had been around for years, and the only discussion platforms they ever knew where centralized platforms with millions and millions of users run by mega corporations. In their personal life experience, Reddit has always just existed, they've never known a world without YouTube, Snapchat is what they used when they were little kids, TikTok had been around long enough that's it's considered an established media outlet.
They've never seen a Usenet group, they've never had accounts on phpbb forums. Choosing a smaller platform with a more selective userbase just doesn't exist in their reality.
Not really. Privacy wise it’s terrible, but user experience is pretty alright I’d say for a microblogging platform. In fact I feel like it’s going to threaten the fediverse by being open at first and then slowly closing up and locking people in, creating an image where all the other nodes should be part of meta’s fediverse and follow certain rules, etc.
Related content. https://beehaw.org/post/719121
This article is “How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)” and it tells you how Googled killed a federated protocol for instant messaging, XMPP, by the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish process.
I don't see that connection. XMPP wasn't big before and it wasn't big after. XMPP is still not big. But it also still exists and is still used.
I think what Google achieved with the usage of XMPP was not some EEE tactics, just as I don't see Threads extinguishing ActivityPub. I think they use open standards as a way to calm regulatory bodies. "Hey look, we have no evil in mind, we use open standards and allow others to play along." Then once they are out of the spotlight, they can slowly defederate again and be a proprietary beast.
Users who leave other fediverse instances to join Threads (or back then Talk) would have also left if they never federated in the first place, simply because they have the bigger network and all their friends are there. The difference is, that they had a relatively brief period of time where you could actually keep communicating with friends without leaving the fediverse.