Twitter users jump to Mastodon, but what is it?
Mastodon and federated systems like it will not succeed beyond a tiny niche, will not replace twitter, and don't even solve most of the problems they try to solve.<p>They don't fix the upstream issues that lead to centralization. Incentives mean most users end up centralized on a handful of servers with a worse experience. It's the worst of both worlds. As designed the UX is bad and cannot be fixed because of these issues.<p>Twitter has been a terribly mismanaged company for a long time and there's general consensus on this. Jack knew this, but was powerless to actually make the changes necessary to fix it. Elon may not succeed, but I hope he does and what he's doing is a necessary prerequisite. People dismiss his obvious success elsewhere in other insanely hard domains, they can largely be ignored.<p>I want a world where people have actual ownership over their computing, but federated system designs like Mastodon will not get us that and we have thirty years of failure to prove it. The press pretending otherwise because they hate Elon and see tech companies as a threat are just embarrassing themselves.<p>To solve this problem for real is a lot harder, but I'm optimistic it's not impossible. <a href="https://zalberico.com/essay/2022/09/28/tlon-urbit-computing-freedom.html" rel="nofollow">https://zalberico.com/essay/2022/09/28/tlon-urbit-computing-...</a>