- With Mastodon, it's immediately more complicated than that.
- Free isn't a factor in Mastodon's favour because Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are also free. And it's simple to understand and join.
- Everyone is on Twitter, so if you want to see their tweets, you have to join too.
Is there something inherit in Mastodon that makes it more complicated, or is this an obstacle that can be overcome (like email did)
I'm writing a very basic social media app, myself, right now, and have developed an appreciation for the complexity behind the façade.
This is why we don't see normal users (non techies) themselves self-hosting their own email servers to send a email, even though the option is there.
Even if they did, the biggest email providers deal with the spam problem better than self-hosted individuals, hence why it isn't a problem for users signing up to Gmail.
Mastodon will naturally gear towards centralization once the larger instances open up their instances and add defaults, ruining the whole point of federation with the biggest instances being at risk of buyouts and takeovers offers.
What I'm referring to is free on the supply side. There is now free and widely available server software which not only will let you host a social network, but will also connect you to an existing social graph via ActivityPub. Prior to this, how were you going to compete with Twitter? You needed to build your own client and your own social graph and that was a huge barrier to entry. The tools which exist for a new competitor today (e.g. Mastodon and still a fairly small fediverse) are far from perfect, but they are improving and you can extend them however you like. That looks a lot like an environment where someone disruptive could appear, add value is missing, figure out a way to monetize and so on.
Not anymore and less each day. Twitter is no longer a valid choice for a lot of people.