Mastodon has not adequately replaced Twitter. I don\u2019t know if it can. I would need various minor league sports teams to adopt it, along with certain online personalities who are not really celebrities as such but whose fame is entirely on Twitter (thinking of you, Scafe, hope you\u2019re well), and Mastodon as I have it constructed has not really become the place where you go when things happen, the way Twitter was for March Madness or the Oscars or whatever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is not a dealbreaker. Twitter first emerged in 2007, and yet I don\u2019t think we really had a sense of what it was *for* until 2009 at the earliest and maybe longer. Similarly. Even though Mastodon has been around for many years, it has only really emerged onto the public radar in the last twelve months and has just crossed 10 million users, so we are still in early days of figuring out what it\u2019s for – not least because it is not emerging in a vacuum. Mastodon exists in a world where Twitter exists, has existed, and where we know what was wrong and needed fixing even before Phony Stark shat all over it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The funny thing is that a couple more blasts from the past have resurfaced. Unsurprisingly, Gowalla made its grand re-entrance at SXSW, fourteen years after Foursquare stormed to the lead of location-based social networking. Back then, no one knew quite what those apps were for, only that they might surpass Twitter or Foursquare, and as such they were of their time: free at point of use with the promise that ad revenue would somehow make it all worthwhile. Then Foursquare split into two apps and sank beneath the waves, while Gowalla was acquired by Facebook who promptly did naff all with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Well, Gowalla is back, and this time relying on a model of \u201ca small number of power users pays for extra features which in turn fund the app as a whole for the free users.\u201d Which seems more sustainable and privacy-friendly than advertising, for sure, who knows. My problem was that I was ten years too old for these apps the first time, and in a world without the prospect of seeing \u201chey, they\u2019re down on Castro, I should go by\u201d, I don\u2019t know what it\u2019s useful for in my life. You kind of need local friends to make location-based social networking happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On the other hand, Hipstamatic became a sensation as it used vintage retro filter effects to disguise the generally shitty quality of early-Obama-era phone cameras – and then was passed quickly by Instagram, which had a social network attached. Well, lo and behold, Hipstamatic has added a social feature, and we now have a known brand behind a product that is exactly what we all claim to want: original Instagram the way it used to be. It will be interesting to see how much uptake there is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
See, the problem is, we all say we want social media the way it was in 2009-11 before it all went wrong, and maybe we do. But we\u2019re also pig-committed to our existing social graph, and you can\u2019t get anyone to move off Twitter, Insta and Facebook until *everyone* does. It\u2019s the same problem I have with Signal – I have plenty of folks willing to use it for text and group chat, but no one seems to have adopted Stories despite it being a cryptologically sound and privacy-protective alternative to Insta, because everyone\u2019s already on Instagram. I am trying to be the energy of activation, but it\u2019s the same problem we had with Path, with Peach, with micro.blog, with Cocoon – too much inertia, too many things to have to check. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Which is sad. Between Gowalla, Hipstamatic, Mastodon and Signal, the 2011 social media experience is right there to be seized. All the pieces are in place, it\u2019s a lighter lift than it has been in years or is likely to be. And yet, at this point, the only thing that might so it would be for Apple to officially suture together Messages, iCloud Photo Sharing and Find My into one app and call it Pal Around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hint, hint, hint.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mastodon has not adequately replaced Twitter. I don\u2019t know if it can. I would need various minor league sports teams to adopt it, along with certain online personalities who are not really celebrities as such but whose fame is entirely on Twitter (thinking of you, Scafe, hope you\u2019re well), and Mastodon as I have it … <\/p>\n