The fundamental issue I see repeatedly is that Interoperability (what Mastodon and Fedi truly offers) is a no-brainer for tech-types but completely uninteresting and in some-cases a turn off for laypeople. Creates a huge adoption issue.

I’ve had conversations with people that go “I don’t care that other people can follow me from other servers - I want all my friends to be on the same server as me. Why would I just want some person to be running my server anyways?”

I was collecting tweets about this for a blog post I was planning to write about this phenomenon. I find it fascinating people find Mastodon “too complicated”, because I think it’s truly as streamlined as it gets for a Fediverse onboarding tool.

What this means in the long term is that it will remain the alt-network that it had been since day one, and I think that’s totally okay. I do think it’s a shame more people aren’t just accidentally adopting an interoperable system

If people were more willing to jump onto Mastodon, I think it’d change the level-of-standards people would have for the other social networks they use. Doctrow writes about this concept a bit.

https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy

I think there’s fundamentally two “queues” of people using social media - ones who like their feeds to “stop” - i.e. run out of content once they’ve caught up with their friends posts - and ones who want a never-ending river of content.

The fact is advertisers love algorithmically driven feeds, and the majority of people either don’t care, or actively prefer it. This means corporate social media will adopt this tech more in the future. Mastodon will run parallel to this.