Wednesday, November 30, 2022

Over the last few days I’ve come across more and more people moving from Twitter to Mastodon. It’s caused me to poke around Mastodon a little and I’ve added some users to my Micro.blog timeline. Whilst the technology behind it is great something about it feels a little bit like a side step rather than a forwards step.

This morning I had 5 minutes to kill between meetings and an unusully empty email inbox so I had a little nose through my RSS instead. I came across a post on MacStories about a shortcut Federico has created to open toots (seriously?) from one Mastodon instance on the instance your account exists on. It immediately felt broken. For the techies who are willing to invest the time jumping through these kinds of hoops it’s fine. For the non-techies in the world, they’re never going to understand this or have the inclination to try. As I clicked around Mastodon and came across a few people I used to follow on Twitter, I found myself looking for a link to their personal web site instead of looking for their username. I’d rather add their blogs to my RSS reader than jump through hoops to follow their toots.

I realised right then that we still have the same problem we had before Twitter. Following a blog or personal website still requires some underlying knowledge of technology. Clever people are spending a lot of time and energy building the fediverse which despite all the best will in the world is still ultimately a silo. The walls might not be so solid or high, but the content still sits behind a sign in and is visited through someone elses domain. Would we not be better off in the long run putting that effort into making it easier for the average person to setup their own personal website, post to it, and follow the websites of their friends? Isn’t the web enough? Do we really need a fediverse?