A good brief
About the economics of open platforms. I was pretty much told I was an idiot by my lecturer when doing project management at uni, for trying to run an open platform without having worked out how to sustain it. He was absolutely right, as I found out there years later at my own cost.
As for Mastodon: it's the current hype among certain types ("social justice warriors", whatever that is, far right types, and of course porn purveyors).
I took a look at it last time there was a press fueled moral panic about social media silos (which are of course a problem). A few people sign up at that point, they complain for a while about whichever platform they just "left", and then they just disappear. There is no real content of interest to professionals or even the general public for that matter.
That is of course a "critical mass" issue, but the other problem with Mastodon and associates is its terrible scalability. It's super resource hungry, a pain in the arse to set up properly, and the underlying protocol, called activity pub is, IMO, way too chatty and inefficient.
The really sad thing is, we had NNTP, which worked fairly well and piggybacked on existing infrastructure (email). I'm sure that given a quick refresh it would do a *much* better job than mastodon in terms of resources usage and the general economics of it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
