Mastodon

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Decentralised and open source social network.

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I came across this on Artifact (justingarrison.com)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I came across this blogpost regarding Mastodon. I would love to get you guys thoughts. This is from earlier in the year, the authors thoughts may have changed but not likely. Some points make sense others not so much.

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[–] [email protected] -3 points 10 months ago

The article is basically a straw man. It sets up this assumption that Mastodon is doomed unless it can grow to Twitter scale and have celebrities on it, and so on. However, this supposition is completely baseless.

The only things Mastodon needs to thrive are having enough devs to maintain the platform, enough people to run instances, and enough users to generate content. All these things are already in place, and millions of people are using Mastodon today. It can exist in its current state indefinitely.

I think it's important to recognize that open source has very different dynamics from commercial platforms. A company has to keep growing to make profit for the investors, and if it stops and loses funding then the platform goes away. This doesn't apply to open source projects developed by volunteers who are doing it out of passion and personal interest.

Lots of projects like Linux are still very niche, this doesn't make them doomed in any way.