Mastodon has all the fundamental problems of email. It's actually worse because personal grievance can get you blacklisted by the cabal of major instances, instead of actual spam.
That being said, there are truly horrible servers that get almost universally banned. Many have borderline-illegal content and the rest have toxic content and users. The large servers have maintained a block policy resembling old Twitter. Unless we want a festering swamp of toxicity, that seems like a fair compromise. Anyone desperate for Gab can join Gab.
This is why Mastodon is doomed. Instead of being a common carrier, it seeks to make a network free of 'toxicity'---whatever that means.
Anything that crosses over into regulating perfectly legal speech will draw the exact people who shouldn't be regulating perfectly legal speech.
The majority of us can agree on these standards. Despite that, I see plenty of people violate them across the political spectrum. It shouldn't be tolerated or respected, but you can hold a wide range of political beliefs without crossing that line.
This sounds fine without context, but according to wokeists, misgendering someone is “advocating for violence” and criticizing Islam is “racism”, for example.
Too much toxic content and spam, and I think there's a big overlap between the two, will make a platform unusable or at least undesirable to many. That's what happened to Usenet.
i think its precisely the opposite.
im skeptical of the "succeed" and "failure" descriptors people keep using regarding these places, but in terms of longevity, i think having multiple different spaces is precisely why Mastodon or some derivative will be booming.
in the real world, we have different styles of spaces with different styles of behavioral expectations. and we have these precisely because people prefer that kind of freedom. if i want a nice quiet dinner, i don't go to the loud sports bar, i go to a quiet restaurant. if i want a loud drunken night, i don't go to a string quartet, i go to a club or something. i pick my space based on my mood. simple as that. its not complicated.
bars and clubs have wildly different expectations of behavior for totally common sense reasons. i continually find it baffling (and honestly kind of weird) that some have convinced themselves that online spaces full of humans would be any different.
ive noticed this weird tendency over the past couple of years, that a certain type of people (many of them seem to be from the same group strain of VCs) have been desperately trying to convince us that we all need to be in one space -- all of us, at the exact same time, and anything less than all of us at once is "failure". and that having multiple options is somehow bad... and im sorry, but nah, thx tho.
sometimes we like a nice restaurant, sometimes we like to go clubbing, sometimes we like a coffeehouse with a few friends. again, this isnt complicated--its spaces full of humans, we have different preferences. this isn't new and it isn't shocking.
this is why mastodon (or some later branch) will thrive ahead.