A: let's make mastodon bigger than twitter
B: let's make mastodon much nicer than twitter instead and maybe realize that it doesn't need to have millions of users to be "successful"
@tcql Powerful, insidious brainwashing :x
@tcql Certainly doesn't work for CMOS transistors
@tcql Important exception to this:
burritos
@tcql I mean, wait, no, I was horrendously unclear there.
I mean, bigger actually is better with burritos, there's no capitalist brainwashing there.
@IrisKalmia @gravecat ya the filling to wrap ratio has to be right too
@tcql frankly, i prefer it stay at a reasonable size that can be managed by human beings. the main mastodon instance is already too big which is one of many reasons why i moved to this smaller and slower one. also, bigger than twitter = more vulnerable to exploitation and greater risk, which would nullify the point of everyone leaving twitter in the first place
@TRONMAXIMUM definitely. mastodon.social was "too big" when i first joined, and that's when it was <50k users
and as much as the fediverse promotes uniqueness, the magic of mastodon is that right now it's small enough there are some generally~~ shared cultural values that are impossible to maintain reasonably if you're the size of twitter.
@TRONMAXIMUM @tcql @gravecat the first sentence here also applies to burritos
@tcql C: Where are my IRL friends? I want at least some of them to join, but they refuse, because none of their friends are on Mastodon either. How can we fix that? Option A. Oh...
@tcql exactly! Large scale is only required when systems are not designed to be sustainable at small scales. A Mastodon instance with 10 users who can kick-in 1 USD/month can run forever :)
@tcql yeah, that's pretty crucial. like just because twitter has millions of users doesn't mean it's a quality social network or worth spending your time on (see: nazis, harassment brigades)
@tcql porque ¿no los dos?
@clar porque i think B is much more difficult to maintain as you move closer to A happening
B — all day long.
@tcql well said.
@tcql let's focus on making it nicer, but be prepared to scale up in case that niceness ends up attracting a huge crowd.
@tcql b. Definitely b.
@tcql B all the way. I mean, what would A even accomplish? It'd just replace Twitter, and then it'd have everyone from Twitter posting the same stuff they posted over there, making Mastodon functionally identical to what birdsite is now.
@IrisKalmia @tcql This~ is very true, and would actually probably help fix a lot of the biggest problems birdsite has.
@tcql I think the whole 'oh bububu Masto will never beat birbseed' is coming from that kind of "oh you cant do marketing and targeted ads on Masto so it'll never go anywhere bubub'.
what are we doing y'all we'll never be the next LinkedIn at this rate!!
@tcql its a mistake to treat those as opposing things
One of the main things that drives people away from twitter is harassment, ie its not nice, if twitter was able to deal with this problem it could presumable be bigger.
Secondly mastodon is much larger than gnu social ever was, and why was it able to atract more people? i got the impression that a lot of people joined because it was presented as a nicer alternative to twitter, something that wasn't an option for gnu social.
there is an issue with how big individual instances can be before they are unmanageable, but that doesn't mean the mastodon network cant be big
@radicalgraffiti to be honest, i didn't really intend this to mean that they're mutually exclusive. i think it's *harder* to keep things nice at scale, but not impossible.
this was more of a response to a wave of new folks coming in and immediately being like "twitter is dead to me let's make mastodon bigger than twitter to shove it in their faces"
@tcql oh i haven't seen that
bigger = better is capitalist brainwashing