My takeaway as a long time user who quit Twitter after Musk, I landed on Mastodon, but it was a lousy replacement in most every way. So I quit it too. The Fediverse is a flawed idea and the open source zealots are annoying as hell. I might be interested in Bluesky if it ever gets out of beta, but life without social media has been better than I imagined it would be and I’m in no big hurry to jump back into the fray…

Bloonface blog;

Mastodon is at risk of falling into the trap that a lot of free/open source software does, where the idea of the software being “free as in speech” is expected to outweigh or explain away deficiencies in its usefulness. However, this ignores three salient facts:

  • Most people don’t give a thruppenny fuck about their freedom to view and edit the source code of the software they use, which they would not know how to do even if they cared;
  • Most people are not ideologically opposed to the notion of proprietary software, and cannot be convinced to be because it is simply not important to them and cannot be explained in terms that are important to them; and
  • When given the choice between a tool which is immediately useful for achieving some sort of goal but conflicts with some kind of ideological standpoint, and a tool which is not as useful but they agree with ideologically, they will probably choose the former.

John Gruber (DaringFireball);

I would like to see Mastodon thrive. But the platform’s ideological zealotry is obviously holding it back and seemingly isn’t going to change. That’s why I’m much more optimistic about Bluesky’s long-term prospects.