I suspect that the sky-is-falling panickery of Silicon Valley software engineerdudes over on Twitter is overwrought, but I'm more intrigued by the conversation of trying to predict how a mass influx of real people will painfully force Mastodon gatekeepers to start listening to users for the first time.

Up till now, it's barely ever moved past the "we engineers can engineer solutions to social issues through engineering decisions that make trouble impossible" mindset, which is delusion.

Case in point: finally changing the text label on a "post" button to something that actually communicates what it does.

What's next? Actually adding features that people want to use, like quotes? Egad; where will the madness end!

Covering the spread on that issue would be betting on when the first "I'm forking Mastodon to restore it to its glory days when I didn't have to deal with all these people" appears.

The downside, I guess, to Mastodon finally adapting to users would be that that likely steers it further into being a copy of an existing site.

Which has always been the awkward elephant in the room: the trope of "all FOSS does is copy other people's ideas after they're successful".

People have had a lot of concepts for OTHER things federated protocols could do and functionality they could enable, but nobody ever prioritized that. They argued about blocklists and the word "toot" instead.