I was just thinking about this earlier today with respect to Mastodon and federated social networks. As someone who has been very actively using Mastodon for years, it is frustrating — painfully frustrating — when people criticise it in the abstract. "It will never work" then why is it working? "People won't know how to sign up" it is easier to sign up than any the average email service - blah, blah, blah - actually it's not worth anyone's time answering these questions. Just use it. _use it_ for goodness sake.
My issue with mastodon is that exploring servers means creating a bunch of accounts. That's kind of annoying. I still like and use Mastodon, but there it is.
"It will never work" can mean so much. It will never be bigger than Twitter (almost certainly true), it will never work to spread my ideas to a wide audience, that may or may not be true.
My issue with Mastodon is that it imitates Twitter a little too well. I keep finding people to block when looking for people to follow. The local and federated feeds are infested with spammers, self-righteous ideologues of all kinds, 4chan rejects, and bots. It just isn't worth the effort.
