Mastodon grew from earlier tools (ActivityPub, GNU Social, StatusNet) dating to the early aughts.
I'd joined in 2016, kicked tyres for a bit, and increased my own usage around 2018. By the time Twitter's October Revolution arrived in 2022, the platform was sufficiently well-developed to both accommodate a substantial new influx and appeal to at least some of those new participants.
And Mastodon and the Fediverse had seen previous waves of adoption, often led by drama, dissatisfaction, or shutdowns at or of other networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.).
What tends to occur is that systems evolve and develop over time, as do the communities making use of them. It's less that there's One Big Event than there are a succession of smaller ones ... until a tipping point is reached.
Where the Fediverse is in terms of the long slow implosions of Twitter and Reddit remains to be seen, but don't discount long-simmering discontent and the emergence of new options. As a podcast noted recently: even power users of Twitter refer to the service as "Hellsite", and that's a very unstable situation. People remain out of inertia and lack of alternatives, not from some deep and abiding love of the service. Reddit increasingly seems to be in a similar place.
I'd joined in 2016, kicked tyres for a bit, and increased my own usage around 2018. By the time Twitter's October Revolution arrived in 2022, the platform was sufficiently well-developed to both accommodate a substantial new influx and appeal to at least some of those new participants.
And Mastodon and the Fediverse had seen previous waves of adoption, often led by drama, dissatisfaction, or shutdowns at or of other networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.).
What tends to occur is that systems evolve and develop over time, as do the communities making use of them. It's less that there's One Big Event than there are a succession of smaller ones ... until a tipping point is reached.
Where the Fediverse is in terms of the long slow implosions of Twitter and Reddit remains to be seen, but don't discount long-simmering discontent and the emergence of new options. As a podcast noted recently: even power users of Twitter refer to the service as "Hellsite", and that's a very unstable situation. People remain out of inertia and lack of alternatives, not from some deep and abiding love of the service. Reddit increasingly seems to be in a similar place.