this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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What you are partially seeing here is the fact that there is friction to the very idea of Mastodon not being owned by a massive corporation. People have been trained so well to expect their social media to be run by a massive corporation that even if an alternative social network like Mastodon did onboarding perfectly people are still going to get tripped up and feel confused about Mastodon simply because a bunch of rich people don’t own it.
It is maddening and there isn't much we can do about it other than treat that friction as an opportunity to help radicalize people into being more open in a broader sense to taking back aspects of their life from the control of rich people/massive corps.
People don't care that it's not owned by a millionaire. What they care about is it being simple and easy to understand. One choice is as simple as it gets.
People most definitely do care about that, and every single day more and more people are realizing how much ownership over their digital community spaces matters.
That process happens slowly most of the time but occasionally it happens in huge bursts that in a short time change the longterm growth trajectory overnight of the Fediverse. We can’t foresee when events will trigger that but the potential is always there.
Yes people will not use a service because a billionaire owns it. But nobody is using a service simply because a billionaire owns it. People might choose bluesky over mastadon because the owner created twitter originally. But nobody is choosing it because Jack Dorsey has a fuck ton of money.
Elon's rabid fanbase not withstanding. That's more the exception though, not the rule.
I get what you are saying but my point is I actually think subconsciously (and sometimes even consciously) this is how people think. The collective organism of (at least US) society desperately wants a businessman (especially a techy one) to tell us what the future of social media is. People aren't actually able to comprehend NOT needing a tech businessman to own their social media in a lot of ways. It is weird, but it is really just a natural consequence of how utterly obsessed US culture is with seeing all of society through capitalism and rugged individualism.