The Washington Post recently published an op-ed by Megan McArdle titled “Twitter might be replaced, but not by Mastodon or other imitators.” The article argues that Mastodon is falling into a common trap for open source projects: building a look-alike alternative which improves things a typical user doesn’t care about, while missing elements that made the original successful. Instead, she suggests that deposing Twitter will require something that is wholly new, and offer the masses something they didn’t know they wanted.
Where we disagree, is that Mastodon (as part of the Fediverse) does offer that in the form of a truly interoperable and portable social media presence. Characterizing Mastodon as a mere Twitter-clone overlooks this strength of the fediverse to be or become any social platform you can imagine. That’s the power of protocols. The fediverse as a whole is a micro-blogging site, as well as for sharing photos, videos, book lists and reading updates, and more.
Since this is a widely held misconception about the fediverse, and as a picture is worth a thousand words, let’s take a look at how the wider world of ActivityPub works in practice.
This is PeerTube. It’s a video hosting site that allows people to follow others, upload video, comment on, and “like” videos. This is the main channel page for the Blender open source project, and from here you can subscribe to the channel. (For all of these images, right click and choose “Open in a new tab” to get a better view.)