How #Meta wants to destroy the #Fediverse with #Threads: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
@veit I think it's so striking that the article doesn't touch on the most important factor: simply serving users better.
A huge reason users stuck with Google and Facebook and others isn't some nefarious plot to take over, but simply because those platforms offered users the experiences they were looking for.
They served their users.
Mastodon and other fediverse projects need to focus on this, focus on building up, not complaining about what other entitles like these businesses are doing.
Unfortunately, that seems to often get lost in fediverse related development.
@volkris @veit let’s not forget inertia and social glue either. I dont think they are always served better. Think of it like a soda product and kombucha. Soda companies aren’t making a better product but they’ve been ingrained in the social fabric long enough and have enough exposure they self generate customer bases. It takes a mountain of time to disrupt them and at the end of the day you are growing the pie and shrinking slices ever so slightly to wedge in new.
But you're dismissing the simpler explanation too easily: what if they ARE actually making a better product?
Yeah, we can speculate with more complicated theories about social glue, marketing schemes, and all sorts of things, but Occam's Razor would have us at least consider that maybe the product is simply better.
@volkris @veit not at all but I don’t think you can boil that down to such a thing that is fully subjective. What is better? How is it measured? To whom is it better? For which demographic? Is it always better? I’d hazard it’s far easier to Occam’s razor that inertia is simpler to understand just due to gravity of numbers available then trying to take a complex topic hiding in simple words like better.
Exactly! It's subjective, and people who pay in time or money to buy the product are expressing their subjective opinions that the option makes them better off, suggesting that it's better.
But when you say things like "Soda companies aren't making a better product" you run into exactly that subjectivity and a bunch of customers choosing the product, showing that to them at least the product provides value, and might very well be a better product.
@volkris @veit there’s a fallacy here somewhere. If you have no user base and literally make a better product vs have a user base of millions and make a mediocre product the product that is not seen will not create enough disturbance due to a lack of reach. You’d say that’s the better product is the adopted one. Not the one that might actually be better. Their time and effort using a mediocre product isn’t defining its quality just its adoption.
No fallacy since that's not what I'm saying :)
I would never say the better product is the adopted one.
I WOULD say that the adopted product shows value, or else people wouldn't adopt it.
But beyond some amount of value there is only the suggestion that maybe the adopted product is better than others for various intrinsic and extrinsic reasons, or maybe it's not at all.
But we can say that the adopted product has value that may or may not be superior to others.
But the thing is, if x offered no value people wouldn't use it. If it offered not enough value people wouldn't use it.
Even ignoring the relative part, that people use it means it offers them value.
And so the other social media platforms continue to exist only because their users value them.
@volkris @veit indeed. Although I wonder how long it takes for falloff to occur on brands that don’t have a lot of competition. Like, yea. This sucks. But X is so little different than Y. Or what else will we do? As a retail owner I’ve always said id write a book if I ever understood consumer behavior and I can’t. It’s just so varied and changing. Humans are weird. 🫣😆