I think it's more of a replacement for twitter. And I am genuinely excited about Mastodon, with ~600k users and 1400 instances, I think something special is happening there.
I guess diaspora* is supposed to be the decentralized facebook replacement, but I don't think it's any good. I dare say that it's too late for even a good replacement to compete with facebook. Google tried while there was still time (and failed). But now? I don't think you can.
> I dare say that it's too late for even a good replacement to compete with facebook. Google tried while there was still time (and failed).
Google hasn't had a great track record with these things in general. The problem with a lot of Facebook alternatives is that they make a somewhat better Facebook and then hope everyone will switch over. Of course that's going to fail. Sites that succeed have reasons for people to use them even if there aren't mass migrations.
We know that people have a need for social sites other than Facebook. Slack's been successful, so has Discourse. Heck, meetup.com is still going even though by a naive understanding of things Facebook should have subsumed it (it has a much smaller base, and you need to pay something like $140 a year if you want to start a group). A Facebook alternative will eventually catch on, but it's not going to be a site that starts out by trying to mimic Facebook with a few extra bells and whistles attached.
We need 1 instance for every individual, that's the problem. Non techies who already have privilege to access internet should be able to instantiate their own instances very easily.
I'm all for it if we can get there, but I think a wide range of individual, federated instances is a good step in that direction, and even that would be a huge achievement.
I think something like Opera Unite had the potential to be a single instance per person if that ever caught on.
I think Mastodon as a native or Electron app that uses bit torrent protocol should do it. Not sure what's the problem with that or I am too optimistic.
That would be optimal, but I don't think it's strictly necessary. The fundamental requirement is that, if the owner of an instance behaves poorly, users should be able to move elsewhere without being cutting off from the larger network.
Yes, it's just a twitter clone where people 'toot' instead of 'tweet'. It's fine work but they don't seem to have any idea how to make it desirable for people to use.
I guess diaspora* is supposed to be the decentralized facebook replacement, but I don't think it's any good. I dare say that it's too late for even a good replacement to compete with facebook. Google tried while there was still time (and failed). But now? I don't think you can.