
Why Mastodon and the fediverse are “doomed to fail” - ColinWright
https://write.as/eloquence/why-mastodon-and-the-fediverse-are-doomed-to-fail
======
Normille
I'm not sure the author of this article lives in the same universe as me:

 _"...A vast number of people find Mastodon, Pleroma, WriteFreely, Pixelfed,
and the many other wonderful fediverse tools useful, yet we hear about these
platforms almost entirely by word-of-mouth, not from the technology sections
of major news sites, or even dedicated tech blogs..."_

Perhaps partially true about the others mentioned but Mastodon and PixelFed in
particular seem to have been rarely out of the tech press, for the past year
or so. So much so that I have, in the past, asked how come they get so much
uncritical press coverage and concluded that they each have very active PR
departments.

Funnily enough, I've had a similarly titled draft of an article sitting on my
hard drive for months now, but never got around to knocking it into shape. My
TLDR; conclusion is that the Fediverse is 'doomed to fail' because it's based
on a fallacy of un-censorability and freedom from control by faceless
corporations; _" If you don't like the way it's [a fediverse server] run, you
can take your data elsewhere"_ being the oft-quoted mantra.

It's a fallacy because you simply can't 'take your data elsewhere'. Exporting
your data from Mastodon will export your settings and followers list --the two
easiest things to replicate elsewhere. Your actual posts are not able to be
exported. So, if you move servers, you essentially lose everything you've
invested in Mastodon, just like you would if you moved from Twitter to
Mastodon or A.N.Other social network, in the first place.

I'm not sure if a similar situation exists with PixelFed. I never even got so
far as trying that one, when I signed up and then found out there was no way
to import my existing photos from Instagram. Which raises the other reason why
these new kids on the block are doomed to fail: None of them provide a way for
you to import your existing data from the 'big boy' social networks they're
seeking to replace and hoping people you will switch from.

Here's an issue about this on PixelFed's Github from Jan 2019, which makes
this particular point in more detail [0]. as you can see, Pixelfed's response
was a vague _" It's on the roadmap"_ and, a year later, to close the issue. As
far as I'm aware, there is still no way to import your existing Instagram
photos to PixelFed.

The above is also true of Mastodon; no Twitter import there.

In addition to those two glaring problems, the Fediverse is also touted as the
answer to corporate censorship and hailed as a defender of free speech. Yet
the same freedom loving Fediverse quickly closed ranks in attempt to freeze
out Gab.com, when Gab adopted Mastodon; firstly by refusing to list Gab's
servers in their Mastodon instance directories --in spite of Gab.com having
the largest number of users-- and, secondly, by releasing updates to several
Android and iOS Mastodon client apps, so that they would no longer connect to
Gab's servers, even if the app user manually entered the server info. So much
for 'individual freedom of choice, not dictated by corporations'!

That spat caused Gab to fork Mastodon and create their own version, Gab-Social
which, actually seems now to be more advanced and feature rich than the
official Mastodon software it split off from. So because of "politics",
regular Mastodon users lose out on advances made by Gab's coders and the
Fediverse is further diluted by having two different and incompatible versions
of their 'Twitter-Killer'. Yay! As if there weren't enough obstacles to mass
adoption already, let's add 'fragmentation' into the mix!

'Fediverse Doomed to Failure' is spot on!

[0][https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/issues/765](https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/issues/765)

[1][https://code.gab.com/gab/social/gab-
social/](https://code.gab.com/gab/social/gab-social/)

