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Comment by JulianMorrison | Hacker News Reader

My feeling is that this may be the breakthrough moment for Mastodon.

I don't think there will be one single moment. Every stumble from a big silo leads to a huge burst of growth and a return to a slightly higher norm. It's more likely this slow transfer of users will continue until the narrative is more "Mastodon finishes off [x]" for each one and less "users are fleeing [x] for Mastodon".

Tumblr/Twitter/Facebook/etc are going to die the same way malls do. One decade they're a big deal, the next people's slow shift in preferences make them irrelevant. At least they won't leave rotting husks this time.

I can't see how an average Tumblr user is aware of Mastodon.

Even of the ones who are, a lot of are turned off by the UI

Is there an example where a centralized commercial service was successfully replaced by a more open, federated service?

The web replaced AOL and other dial-up portals.

And Microsoft repeatedly tried to stuff the genie back in the bottle in the early years by centralizing the portal, and then the technologies, unsuccessfully.

The electronic mail that came before SMTP would be a good example.

Email is a good example and somebody else mentioned the web in general.

I think the big difference there is that there are game changing advantages to end users being able to send email anywhere and to access all of the web rather than what was essentially one web site.

Federating Tumblr (and Twitter with Mastodon) seems like a lateral move at best. The worst case is that it makes it harder to use and so it might even be a step backwards.

"This is going to be the year of Mastodon."

Sounds oddly familiar.

Followed closely by "This is the year of Linux on the desktop", I imagine.

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