A fairly cogent article about why the Fediverse is flailing right now, and why it might be destined to become B-Chan version X…

Op-ed: Why the great #TwitterMigration didn’t quite pan out

Mastodon is at risk of falling into the trap that a lot of free/open source software does, where the idea of the software being “free as in speech” is expected to outweigh or explain away deficiencies in its usefulness. However, this ignores three salient facts:

Most people don’t give a thruppenny fuck about their freedom to view and edit the source code of the software they use, which they would not know how to do even if they cared

Most people are not ideologically opposed to the notion of proprietary software and cannot be convinced to be because it is simply not important to them and cannot be explained in terms that are important to them

When given the choice between a tool that is immediately useful for achieving some sort of goal but conflicts with some kind of ideological standpoint and a tool that is not as useful but they agree with ideologically, they will probably choose the former