Another stupid hot take about the Fediverse. This time courtesy of Megan McArdle from the Washington Post.
Apparently, Mastodon is doomed because it solves problems most users don't care about.
Just like Linux is a failure—because only hobbyists and IT professionals use it.
Except—unknown to Megan—Linux is a huge success which runs on everything (including your router).
Also Megan seems unaware that *actual* problem with social media really is centralization.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/17/twitter-mastodon-replacement-social-media/
Great! Then Mastodon will have the exact same level of success, being used in niche communities!
Honestly, the take seems about right, with your response dovetailing nicely with it.
Linux was a failure *as a general purpose OS for the general public* and so Fediverse might follow the exact same path, for the same reasons.
You can both be right at the same time, one talking about the general public and the other talking about niche communities.
Because every day you take advantage of its specialist application :)
It's ubiquitous but specialized.
When Linux is running on a router you're not asking it to compute spreadsheets one second and play a first person shooter the next beyond its specialized role of getting data from one port through the other, which it does hour after hour, 23/7.
Anyway, the point is that Linux didn't live up to the hopes so many of us had of becoming the standard desktop OS, and there are lessons to be learned there for Mastodon.
@volkris Congrats, you prompted me to write a thread. https://mastodon.social/@atomicpoet/109711499171229755
@volkris How is Linux a failure as a general purpose OS when you use it every day?