Twitter wasn’t just software or visible leadership (for better or worse) but an entire important slice of Internet history.
Ive been using BlueSky and it’s a damn good alternative to Twitter. In fact, it captures what early Twitter felt like
Twitter isn’t important and federated social media will replace it to a point that it won’t be anything more than a footnote in twenty years, or an unfortunate hurdle that was overcome as the internet matured.
Mind if I ask what makes you believe that federated social media will replace the mainstream ones? Literally everyone around me, everywhere I go, have no clue about any social media besides the big ones. I tried introducing mastodon to a few, but they found it harder to use.
20 years ago this was everyone. The internet was too technical, people didn’t really use search engines, an argument with a friend over who played the bad guy in a movie could go on for hours.
I feel that one day a large organisation will run a large centralised node, much the same way that Google runs Gmail. They can have a smooth onboarding process, no confusion about how to pick a server, and federation can be a footnote. They can pick up lots of non-technical users, who don’t even need to understand that federation is a thing. But people on other servers can interact with them, and that’s the important part. Over time people will start to meet people from other nodes and slowly be introduced to the concepts.
Remember Facebook is still mighty confusing and has it’s own terminology that makes no sense to an outsider, but it’s introduced slowly enough that you can get the basic concepts and slowly learn more. I feel the “pick a server first” model is what is the biggest hurdle at the moment.
Social media so far has not been replaced with a like for like service when something falls out of popularity. Facebook was not just a Myspace clone. It probably won’t be Bluesky or Mastodon that replace Twitter for most of their current users.
