I get the impression that nobody has really mentioned the elephant in the room, which is that Facebook and Twitter are so popular precisely because they are so big, and the IndieWeb is unattractive mainly because it isn't.
Like probably most of you here, I don't care for walled gardens. I host my own blog, avoid Google as best as possible, and am regularly one step away from deleting Facebook. But I don't. Why? Because many old friends are there, and I have no other realistic way of keeping up with them. There's no earthly chance I'll ever get them all onto Mastodon, so for better or worse I'm going to stay where they are. In the end, friendship is more important than philosophy.
On the contrary, after years of avoiding it, I recently started using Twitter. Again, the reason is that that is where the people are. I'm still a bit iffy about it, but I have realised that in my field, almost everybody is on Twitter. It is simply the most efficient way to keep up with what is going on and what the important people are doing. In the end, practicality beats purity.
So yes, I'd love to use micro.blog, or host my own Mastodon instance. But until they can offer me what the elephants of Facebook and Twitter can - i.e., a global community - they don't stand a fighting chance.
Yuuup. A huge portion of the value of a lot of networks is in the sheer size of them - you're much more likely to write content people are interested in, and find content to read that you find interesting.
For a lot of these things, making a better product is the easy part. Getting enough people using them so that they start being useful and valuable is the hard part. This is the exact reason why, after reading a book on market design and matching markets, I pretty much simultaneously realized that A) I could make a better dating app user experience than Tinder etc, and B) I don't have the marketing skills and resources needed to get a lot of people using it, so it's pointless.
Like probably most of you here, I don't care for walled gardens. I host my own blog, avoid Google as best as possible, and am regularly one step away from deleting Facebook. But I don't. Why? Because many old friends are there, and I have no other realistic way of keeping up with them. There's no earthly chance I'll ever get them all onto Mastodon, so for better or worse I'm going to stay where they are. In the end, friendship is more important than philosophy.
On the contrary, after years of avoiding it, I recently started using Twitter. Again, the reason is that that is where the people are. I'm still a bit iffy about it, but I have realised that in my field, almost everybody is on Twitter. It is simply the most efficient way to keep up with what is going on and what the important people are doing. In the end, practicality beats purity.
So yes, I'd love to use micro.blog, or host my own Mastodon instance. But until they can offer me what the elephants of Facebook and Twitter can - i.e., a global community - they don't stand a fighting chance.