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Fork it! It's time for a Mastodon hard fork
(privacy.thenexus.today)
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this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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I say DON'T fork it. Heres the thing nobody in communities wants to come to grips with.......security is not the way to grow a very new platform. "Normie" users will not give one shit if you are super secured with 87 point encrypted authentication. Super secure? Don't mean shit.
You know what normie users DO care about? Marketing. They want one concise marketing vision. They want one baseball brand. One football brand. One basketball brand. One twitter. One facebook. One instagram.
Now. There are times that those dominant platforms can be disrupted. If oh.....I don't know.......some dipshit decided to spend 44 BILLION dollars and spend the next 2 years changing it from the dominant name in microblogging, to a right wing facist supporting echochamber where differing ideas are stiffled, blocked, and shut down.
That would create the need for a secondary dominant microblogging platform that allows for freedom of ideas to be posted and not deleted due to political stance.
Enter Mastadon. It fills that void nicely. It's still small as the majority of the userbase of twitter has no idea Mastodon exists. However it's undeniable they are losing massive numbers of users. Not because they don't like the twitter concept, but because they don't like what it's become.
With more marketing, mastodon COULD be the new dominant twitter, thus rendering that 44Billion dollar purchase even MORE stupid than it already is, if 90% of their userbase leaves.
But where you'll lose them is if they have to make a choice. Mastodon 1 and Mastodon 2??? Well twitter was just twitter......this must not be twitter.
And just like that, you've confused and lost the new user. Forget the fediverse. Forget instances. Forget security. Forget federation. The normie user doesn't know and doesn't care about ANY of that. Instead just say "its one mastodon. It's like twitter without facism"
Boom! User influx. This is already happening in spite of lack of marketing and the fediverse existing. Thats how badly people want a twitter clone. If someone else makes another non-fediverse clone, with no facism, and big money marketing, mastodon won't grow to its full potential.
But for gods sakes! Don't shoot yourself in the foot to spite yourself.
Why's everything need to be so complicated, anyway? Can't we just have on sportsballgame and one twitgramface?
Ironically, the thing that would allow people to use one "twitgramface" account across all the various platforms is federation. But the only way I can imagine it being seamless enough for normies is native browser integration for ActivityPub, perhaps with a new URL scheme like
apub://.... Basically, save a Fediverse account in your browser, and when you open a foreign-instance link someone sends you, you'll see a prompt:How do you want to open this link (
apub:)?You can browse this content via your instance and interact with it with one of your saved Fediverse accounts, or choose an app you have installed:
☐ Remember my choice for feddit.nl
☐ Remember my choice across all instances
ⓘ Why am I seeing this? ︿
This content is on feddit.nl, which is an ActivityPub instance that 3 of your saved Fediverse accounts federate with. To use your account, open this link via your instance, or select Decline to use feddit.nl's default web interface.
So far, only browser extensions can do this, and not very well at that. Of course, all ActivityPub instances and clients would need to adopt this URL scheme whenever a link is shared between users, and the downside is that Reddit, Instagram, Twitter etc. will never recognize
apub:links. Do you think something like this can ever happen?Already too complicated unless it comes pre-installed on your phone as part of the setup process when you buy it.
Don't be that pessimistic, most users had to install Reddit, Twitter and TikTok apps. In the 2010s, grassroots chain emails and Facebook posts with guides to setting up WhatsApp went viral among boomers in my country, touting it as "free SMS". (Facebook camnot legally describe it as "free SMS" but they didn't bother correcting anyone of course.) The fediverse experience is already quite OK if you have a dedicated client but the problem is that not everyone does, which is why we need browser support; people are tired of "wOrKs bEtTeR iN ThE aPp" even if it's true this time. A dedicated URL scheme will automatically associate Fediverse links with any appropriate installed web/local apps. There are still other issues such as hit-and-miss cross-fedi-platform compatibility, no API for retrieving the list of federated instances and lack of appropriate error messages if the source and/or destination instance block each other.
Grandmas can easily install Cookie Clicker and Angry Bird and DownloadMoreRam and anything else they find on the internet with quite an ease. Are you telling me the average internet person is noticeably less capable than a grandma?
And you will notice that in the vast majority of the world, the joke about the ball game happens/happened. America is very american football centric. Germany is all about football. England has cricket. Etc, etc.
You jest, but yes, since our lives are complicated enough as is, we want our hobbies to be as straightforward and easy to communicate/communalize as possible.
Football seems pretty popular in England
Don't people today still choose between Gmail and Outlook?
They do, and I like how seamlessly
mailto:links on websites work with web and local apps: your browser will give you a choice and either will work because email servers network with one another (obviously). Perhaps we could do this with linking to content across the Fediverse, with a custom URL scheme such asapub:@Blaze@reddthat.com. I explore this in my other comment at apub:post/20744080/11206632@reddthat.com.................no? Who uses outlook?
People forced to by work:-P.
I've been using Linux half my life, I have my own Email server, I avoid centralized social media and I hate Outlook with a passion.
I have two active accounts there.
I know quite a few people who still use Hotmail addresses.