Can Big Social just swoop in and take over the Fediverse on a whim?

Realistically, that can't happen.

1. Pivoting a big business is like captaining an aircraft carrier: it is slow and takes deliberation
2. Most businesses don't like to kill their cash cow, and the network effect that they own is their cash cow
3. Big Social itself is in disarray and doesn't have the wherewithal to make good strategic decisions

And there's other reasons too! 🧵

Big Social are no longer the innovators they were.

In actuality, for the past 10 years, most innovations in social media have been created by small, nimble players—which Big Social then attempts to either acquire or copy.

In essence, they've replaced R&D with M&A.

Thus, they probably have nothing new to add to the Fediverse.

The Fediverse is one thing that Big Social cannot acquire or copy.

No one owns the Fediverse, so that's not an option.

And to copy or integrate the Fediverse is to kill their own cash cows.

In essence, the Fediverse targets the chunk in their armour.

Big Social is obsessed with metrics, and proving value through metrics.

What metrics prove the Fediverse's value?

No one knows. Every metric regarding the Fediverse is at best conjecture. Nobody even knows its true size.

Hard to convince a CEO to buy into an idea when nothing is probable through metrics.

Nobody has validated the Fediverse as a place to make money.

Sure, tiny web-hosts might charge for services, but the average Big Social executive isn't looking to make tiny increases in a new venture. They want to 100x or 1,000 their ROI.

Somebody might eventually try this, but Big Social isn't going to be first.

Yes, Big Social has more than enough money and tech to upset the Fediverse.

What they don't have is the capacity to onboard knowledge about the Fediverse quickly and easily.

This is because the actual inner workings of the Fediverse are held by only a small handful of people.

Believe it or not, most people who work at Big Social are *not* social media nerds, and have zero interest in how the technology works.

When they look at Mastodon, their response is pretty much the same as everyone else's: they throw up their hands and say, "This is too complicated!"

And then they close their browser tab.

The only way Big Social challenges the Fediverse is through small competing skunkworks projects.

Which has actually happened with Jack Dorsey's Blue Sky project.

And to be honest, I'm skeptical about Blue Sky for many reasons—which I may talk about in a separate thread.

But more to the point, Blue Sky has been around for 4 years—and why aren't we using Blue Sky?

Before the Fediverse took off this month, Big Social was already intent on pivoting their big aircraft carriers into other "Next Big Thing" initiatives. Too much money and manpower has been stakes into making stuff like the Metaverse happen.

They're not going sudden stop their current pivot to pivot again into the Fediverse.

Money can do a lot of things but it cannot guarantee you a future. And we're seeing this shake out currently with what's going on with Twitter.

If $44 billion isn't enough to guarantee Twitter's future success, why would that same amount guarantee success pivoting to the Fediverse?

There's the matter of culture. When Big Social sees the Fediverse, all they see is a bunch of deviant upstarts.

Joining the Fediverse, and thereafter hijacking it, means getting comfortable with a bunch of misfits that often aren't even currently welcome on Big Social.

And if there's a culture clash, it's not happening.

Finally, a previous parallel for what's happening right now with Big Social and the Fediverse:

At one time, Microsoft owned 98% of the OS market.

Then a tiny community of raggedy upstarts built their own free and open source OS called Linux.

Microsoft did everything possible to keep Linux from growing. They weren't successful at all.

Now Linux is the most dominant OS in the world, and it continues to be free and open source.

If Microsoft can't win, why would Big Social?

/END TREAD

@atomicpoet @jeffjarvis #Microsoft is much more profitable now than when it owned 98% of the desktop OS market.

Microsoft is arguably the biggest Linux distributor on the desktop via WSL2.

Microsoft owns GitHub and therefore the namespaces of most of the world's open-source projects.

Booting Linux on your new laptop depends on Microsoft's goodwill in giving you the signing keys for Secure Boot, and on some new laptops booting Linux isn't permitted.

The vast majority of Linux users run Android, where they don't have root and aren't permitted to recompile their kernel.

This isn't what free and open-source Linux winning would look like. It's better than a Windows monoculture would have been, but it's a much, much less free world than 25 years ago.