I changed phones, and tried to log back into my Fediverse/Mastadon accounts. The app asks me which servers I'm on—I can't find the accounts in my password manager, can't figure out which servers they were, and the ones I thought I was on maybe don't exist anymore? Or were accessible in one but not another app.
So I managed to log into one of the 3 accounts I'm sure that I have still. And I'm a software nerd who makes "educated" decisions all the time around this stuff.
Protocol People really care about that, and you know what? It becomes their network effect. But it is a self-selecting network. The nature or design of what effects and attracts the network is the same mechanism for limiting its size.
TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat all focus on things that other people really care about—namely video creation, photo curation and ephemeral small network cohesion. and those focuses attract other userbases.
Probably, there's a lot more people who want to create and watch short videos than there are people who want to nerd out over what their 1/10,000 servers' community rules and protocol settings are.
I've always feel like this is a fundamental weakness with these systems. They would do better having a monolithic namespace. Want the handle @jack? Too bad. Maybe it should be like a domain name you pay for but other than that I don't see a way for federated systems to get traction.
You are way too nice on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat. It's basically a giant narcissism enabler, just with different media.
The federated stuff is unsuccessful not just because of protocol stuff (if people really wanted, they would find a way) but because it's not cool yet.
The only reason people go on those networks is to try their luck at popularity and find a way to cash out in various manners. Other than that, there is not much point going on there, why would you waste time broadcasting all kinds of things you do instead of just doing more...
So I managed to log into one of the 3 accounts I'm sure that I have still. And I'm a software nerd who makes "educated" decisions all the time around this stuff.
Protocol People really care about that, and you know what? It becomes their network effect. But it is a self-selecting network. The nature or design of what effects and attracts the network is the same mechanism for limiting its size.
TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat all focus on things that other people really care about—namely video creation, photo curation and ephemeral small network cohesion. and those focuses attract other userbases.
Probably, there's a lot more people who want to create and watch short videos than there are people who want to nerd out over what their 1/10,000 servers' community rules and protocol settings are.