Let’s pause Mastodon for a moment and talk about what Google Reader was. Email analogies are rampant with Mastodon because everyone knows what email is, and there’s no one place to sign up for “email.” That’s because ( theoretically) anyone can run an email server, but most people just use Gmail. This was basically the situation in the 1990’s when your friend said “you need to get on email!” except your ISP helpfully supplied you with an email address and 5 megabytes of storage. There’s no algorithm pushing funny cat pictures or engaging (divisive) content. Worse, once you do figure out how to sign up, there’s no content there. Your friend tells you to join Mastodon and you’re like “ok where do I sign up?” and then your friend sends you a manifesto about things like “federation” instead of sending you to the URL where you sign up for Mastodon. Together, they can bring back the heyday of Google Reader.
I’m optimistic about Mastodon, the open-source federated Twitter clone, but even more optimistic about ActivityPub.
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