Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder's 'Facebook rival'

Post by apatters » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 2:03 AM UTC

filmgirlcw wrote: post #181

iamnothere wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mastadon, and any other number of attempts at this have failed (calling Mastadon a failure is unfair, but its not Twitter and won’t ever be), so will this. Who says that success should be measured by Twitter? It may be that no other social network approaches Twitter and Facebook in size given their dominance, but that doesn't mean that there can be no other social networks. In my opinion, one-size-fits-all social w…

Mastodon is successful for sure, but it isn't successful enough to overcome the incumbent in the space, which is what we're talking about. That isn't a bad thing, but it's important to add that context when looking at anything else that is being heralded as "the next X." That's literally why I added the caveat of saying "Mastodon isn't a failure" -- but it hasn't overcome the incumbent and it won't and that may not h…

Post by BlueTemplar » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 2:10 AM UTC

zamalek wrote: post #41

jermaustin1 wrote: post #14

I can't see this as a Facebook rival. From my understanding, this is a social news site with fact checking. I use Facebook to post pictures of my vacations for my family, and get updates on my nieces and nephews since I moved from Houston, TX to NYC 5 years ago. Until someone replaces that aspect in a way that works while still enabling my family to do their memes and quizzes, and all that crap I avoid, there will be…

> I use Facebook to post pictures of my vacations for my family I use Facebook as a perpetually correct address book. People change address, phone number and sometimes email, but never their Facebook account. That single property of Facebook (which is something my generation attributed to Facebook, instead of it being directly coded as a feature) is why I could basically never leave. I've tried to get my family off o…

Post by thosakwe » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 2:26 AM UTC

apatters wrote: post #211

filmgirlcw wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mastodon is successful for sure, but it isn't successful enough to overcome the incumbent in the space, which is what we're talking about. That isn't a bad thing, but it's important to add that context when looking at anything else that is being heralded as "the next X." That's literally why I added the caveat of saying "Mastodon isn't a failure" -- but it hasn't overcome the incumbent and it won't and that may not h…

To think in terms of there even being a next "incumbent in the space" implies a misunderstanding of what is driving Mastodon adoption. The differentiator behind Mastodon is federation via the ActivityPub protocol. And Mastodon is just one implementation of ActivityPub. More are being built every day. It's likely that a world with ubiquitous ActivityPub would look very different from the social media landscape of toda…

Post by logjammin » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 2:55 AM UTC

post_below wrote: post #151

jay_kyburz wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google+ always had a weird broken interface and they just never finished it. I was one of the geeks that flocked to it, and had plenty of friends there. It didn't fail because of network effects, it failed because they stopped working on it before it was finished. It was really strange and I always assumed at the time that Facebook and Google had come to some agreement behind the scenes.

It really was strange, continues to be, the way Google wanders away from products before finishing them. I get ditching things that don't work, but G+ is a great example of something that had plenty of traction in it's early days and, as far as I can see, lost it purely because G didn't seem to care about it.

Post by freehunter » Wed, Nov 20, 2019, 2:59 AM UTC

detaro wrote: post #165

freehunter wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And convincing people to use a service named “scuttle butt”.

A word for chatting is somehow unsuitable as a name because you have to say the horrible 4-letter word "butt"?