M.G. Siegler believes Mastodon is terrible and it will fail:
While it’s impressive that millions of users have apparently given Mastodon a try, the product is far too slapdash and clunky to keep folks engaged.
I agree that right now the product is really clunky and complicated, but that is changing fast. Ivory is in Alpha and looking great. Mammoth is running their own server to make sign-up easier and I imagine more apps will start to go that route. User-controlled, abuse-resistent quote-boosting is actively being discussed.
I think the mistake people make when talking about Mastodon is all tied up in the search for “the next Twitter”. Please, let’s not do that. Let’s not give another social network as much power as we gave that site.
If the criterium for Mastodon to succeed is “creates as many main characters as Twitter did”, then yeah, I agree with Siegler that it’s never going to get there. But if, instead, we think about it as smaller communities, loosely tied together? I think then we might be on to something. Connection > Scale.
