You cannot complain about Facebook collecting your life’s history, while at the same time complaining that diaspora* cannot find your former classmates. You cannot complain about WhatsApp collecting your address book, while at the same time stating you do not use eMail because exchanging addresses is too cumbersome. You either get a system that knows who you are or a system that does not. I do not get the impression that the majority of users who complain about “bad privacy practices” have understood that point yet.

Mastodon did a lot of things right in the beginning. Their interface looks a bit like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite, so everyone familiar with those tools felt right at home. They hit the perfect timing and launched just as a new privacy scandal was exposed, so it was easy for journalists to show off the new kid on the block. And, probably the most essential piece: They had tools available to cross-post from Twitter to Mastodon, basically on day zero. At first, this sounds like a minor thing, but a lot of people signed up on Mastodon and cross-posted their tweets to Mastodon. This means that there was a lot of content available on Mastodon from the beginning, and the users never stopped pouring material into Mastodon, even if they left and went back to using Twitter exclusively. Today, there still is a lot of traffic just from cross-posting tweets.

It feels like large portions of the “Federated Social Network” space, for the lack of a better term, are way too tech-focused, and completely lost track of what they once were claiming to do. We tend to be laser-focused on coming up with new technical challenges to solve, new bugs to fix, and new features to implement. But does it matter? What use is a social network with all the features imaginable, but no users to use them? What use is a perfectly abstracted and well-designed federation implementation, when there is no data to federate?

I wish that more people would consider the reason behind billions of users still using Facebook, instead of just going along their lives as a coder working on whatever their favorite project is. It is disappointing to see so many active people in this field to just say, “oh well, they simply did not learn from their mistakes”, and go on as if that was no big deal. In reality, most people are very unhappy with the current situation, and they would probably love to use alternatives that respect their privacy more. Still, they just cannot consider projects like Mastodon or diaspora* proper alternatives - for a good reason.

Thinking outside of your little technical bubble is hard and uncomfortable. Sometimes, it takes a lot of time and effort, and sometimes, you have to make decisions that violate your principles for the sake of actually helping people. I have seen too many individuals, projects, and organizations get busy petting themselves on their backs for fixing a bug nobody cares about, or for hosting a service nobody cares about, or for writing marketing material nobody reads. I have seen way too many instances of organizations being stuck in their ideology, to a point where they entirely stop fulfilling their original purpose: to bring people forward.

A more social look on the spec by diaspora*'s developer. Just as profound.

Diaspora*'s developer's thoughts on ActivityPub soon after it was released. It's like he foresaw ever issue there is, without ever implementing it. Such insight. He foresaw that C2S won't get much use, he foresaw reply forwarding problems, he foresaw everything!