Lance's quote at the end of the article is so good lol, really cool that Mastodon has lived longer than Google+ already!
this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
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Seems a touch disingenuous to me. I don't think most of the critics of Masto during the days of looking for Twitter alternatives were forecasting Masto to just poof out into thin air Google+ style.
I think they were mostly saying it wasn't a viable mass market Twitter replacement and it wouldn't become that without significant changes.
They were arguably right about that. Bluesky became that, not Masto. Masto went back to being... well Masto. Small, self-referential, insular and quietly chugging along.
Well, there was a way to say "Mastodon isn’t a viable mass market Twitter replacement and it wouldn’t become that without significant changes." It's literally that.
It is also pretty noticeably different than saying "Mastodon won't survive."
Not only that, by Ulanoff also compares Mastodon to a social network that did in fact "poof out into thin air", Peach.
You may of course do all sorts of gymnastics when interpreting his piece, but I take what he said at face value. And the fact that he responded to my thread on fedi and admitted he was wrong (kudos for doing that, by the way!) seems to confirm my face-value reading was closer to his intended message when the piece was published.
I'm not referring to Ulanoff specifically, but come on, let's not be disingenuous, you (I assume it's you, correct me if I'm wrong) using him as an avatar of the criticism Masto was getting at the time. He made a maximalist prediction and was wrong, so he's a convenient target to act as a dismissal of the genuine concerns being raised in general when Masto got into the mainstream's focus.
Notably, he wasn't entirely incorrect. Thousands of people did move on. I did. I'm not writing this on Masto. Did Ulanoff miss the fairly obvious point that with no centralized infrastructure Masto is actually more viable when it's small than when it's large? Sure. Was he right to claim that it was "less Snapchat than Path"? Sure. Arguably whoever remains at Masto is perfectly fine with that, and that's cool, but at the time the debate was whether Twitter would be replaced by Masto, and that did not happen and will not happen, in no small part for the reasons more sharp-eyed critics than Ulanoff pointed out at the time.
It's a bit of a tangent, but to interject my own take I'll say that Masto isn't even on my top 3 for AP applications. Twitter is just not the right format for the way AP works, Masto is not a good implementation of Twitter and some of the technical shortcomings Masto users keep insisting don't matter actually do matter.
Again, as I wrote in my blogpost, one of the problems was that Ulanoff conflated fedi and Mastodon. You are not writing this on Mastodon, but you are writing this on fedi. This is something that Ulanoff missed completely.
Anyway, as I said, you are welcome to interpret stuff anyway you like. To me, his piece was just hilariously lazy, conventional to an almost self-parody level "tech journalism", and that's what I call him out on in my blogpost.
I am not saying Mastodon-the-software-project has no issues, I am not saying fedi has no issues – I talk about those issues in other places at length. But "Shatner could not find me and 'toot' sounds silly therefore this network will not survive" is a take that needs to be pointed at and laughed at when it comes from someone so high up on the tech journalism ladder.
I guess I read it as a general indictment on Masto doomsayers because... well, the take may deserve a response, but singling it out almost a decade after the fact seems weirdly specific. Notably, he was himself responding to a piece in the same medium titled "Bye, Twitter. All the cool kids are migrating to Mastodon (And the big-name brands are following closely behind)", which proved to be just as incorrect.
That's a long time and a narrow view to hold a gotcha on some random tech journalist. Lots of hot takes to get mad about in that space, particularly in the late 2010s. I mean, this piece came out when the conversation around this wasn't even about people fleeing the increasingly decomposing post-Musk corpse of Twitter. The version of Masto he was writing about and its interoperability wasn't even that obvious. You made me look it up. Masto wasn't even using ActivityPub at the time, apparently. There were hotter takes much later, and it seems reasonable to interpret you going over an early one as a proxy of the whole debate.
inb4 all the people who always show up to complain that we need famous people on here for anyone to give a shit about the Fediverse.
Emphatically, I am here because it's all just random weirdos.
Mastodon has more of a flat structure and is designed to be more conversational which is why I think it hasn't caught on amongst celebrities and the pundit class. It's great for conversation but only so-so at self promotion.
there is a ton of famous people active on Mastodon tho. George Takei. John Scalzi. James Gunn. Cory Doctorow. Charlie Stross. William Gibson. Ron Gilbert.
Some left a year ago tho, probably for BlueSky, like Linus Torvald, Stephen Fry, Mark Ruffalo, Greta Thunberg, Felicia Day, etc.
A bunch of official european channels too like the european commission.
Why thank you Snot Flickerman, I think you're pretty random yourself. (/s but not in a butthurt way)
They really shat on Lance in this article, lol.
Lance Ulanoff has replied to this blog post: https://mastodon.social/@Lance_Ulanoff/114285108628269898
Nice to see he took it in stride given how.. aggressive the post was about him lol
Yup, I really appreciate he did reply. Gotta say that it did improve my opinion of him.
Federated social media has been around for a long time; the oldest one that I know of was identi.ca from the late 2000s. ActivityPub platforms like Mastodon have since breathed a lot of life into the federated ecosystem and I'm excited to see what the future holds for it.
Arguably, the first federated social media is email from 1981. A more “social networking” type system is IRC from 1988.
How about Usenet (1980)?
Oh, yeah, that even predates email!
Yup. Up until roughly the times of early Twitter, federated, decentralized communication systems were the obvious norm to any engineer designing one.
Twitter was even meant to be federated and decentralized. I had interviewed one of their first engineers (this piece is about BlueSky, and in Polish; the Twitter thing is important background), who was there and working on that in the very early days. They had a proof of concept. But then the VCs got involved and the decision was that it would be harder to make money on a decentralized service. Rest is history.
Yeah, I had an account on identi.ca. I even wrote about this: https://rys.io/en/168.html
Ah yeah, I remember reading that post awhile ago. I was quite surprised to find out how old Friendica is (first release in 2010); if that doesn't demonstrate longevity, then I dunno what does.
That was a fun read. Loved the sarcasm.
@rysiek@mstdn.social's blog is one of my favorites. He really understand the social aspect to a lot of modern technology.
Aww, thank you!
I did not realize you were OP (or even had a Lemmy account) 😂
ohno, it's out!
Unless google or facebook starts trying to spaghetti up the codebase then drop it, I don't expect it to go anywhere
Facebook is trying with Threads. Threads is directly targeting Fedi. Thankfully, it does not seem to be working the way Meta wanted it to work – that is, to start sucking people in from fedi due to sheer size and presumably better UI. Turns out people who had moved to fedi really hate Meta, who'da thunk it.
I don't mean them trying to compete. I'm referring to a thing they've done before. They offer help to an open source project but their help ends up driving the project into the ground.
Yeah. Thankfully, Fediverse is a bunch of independent projects. There are Pleroma, different Misskey forks, Lemmy, kbin, Pixelfed, Loops, GoToSocial, and dozens more.
Mastodon is still probably the biggest, user-count-wise, but if Mastodon does a real stupid, there's going to be a fork that takes over the mindshare and the instances. This happened with OpenOffice → LibreOffice when the former got taken over by Oracle; this happened with XFree86 → X.org. This happened with ownCloud → Nextcloud.
And there are projects like FediPact, explicitly opposed to having anything to do with Meta on an instance level.
Oh nice, that's a lot of them. I'll be exploring a few! Thank you! For easing my mind and for showing me more options
Sure thing, enjoy!