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Some of these don’t look bad and might even be pretty good on an e-ink display or an eReader type device.
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You learn something new every day! That’s good to know.
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These foss, federated social networks are great and all, but how do we get people to use them? My friends aren’t going to jump ship from Facebook or Instagram, they’re too invested in them. Why move to / add a social network that only one or two people you know use?
I’m thinking they’re going to have to come up with a really compelling feature set if they want people to switch. Mastodon (and GNU Social) just seem to be Twitter clones right now. (Not inherently a bad thing!)
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Take a page from Microsoft’s old playbook:
- Embrace: Make a client that posts and reads the proprietary social network and the replacement in a single, unified view.
- Extend: Add features the proprietary network hasn’t or, better, can’t. (Like iOS adding ad blocking - an ad company like Google can’t block their own business.) Keep a better pace (XKit for tumblr), better customer support (every Twitter client), or some other marketable advantage.
- Extinguish: When you have a critical mass of community, break compatibility. Make your next feature incompatible with the proprietary network.If your network is better, people will stick with you instead of the proprietary.
If you swap “proprietary” and “open”, this is what Google did with XMPP. Their chat was based on it, eventually they added video calling and other features, and then two years ago they made an excuse and turned off federation. Everyone stayed in the walled garden.
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Their is even : https://github.com/kbarrette/mediummode
That actually seems like it would be more irritating than hard mode…