It's been eight years to the day since Lance Ulanoff, the storied Tech and Social Media Expert and an award-winning tech journalist, decided that Mastodon won't survive because William Shatner couldn't find him on here.
Eight years on, Mastodon stubbornly survives:
https://rys.io/en/177.html
Please join me in celebrating the annual Mastodon Won't Survive Day, right here on fedi.
As it happens, one of the oldest Mastodon instances – octodon dot social – is going to close down very soon.
This is a sad milestone, but it also shows the resilience of the broader network – people migrated, and relations remain.
That tiny volunteer-run instance survived longer than Google+ – a gigantic behemoth of a social network, backed by one of the largest tech companies in the world, and pushed down on everyone and their dog through mandatory integration with YouTube.
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I will probably never get tired of having a hearty laugh on Mastodon Won't Survive Day.
Ulanoff's piece is such a great example of "tech bubble journalism" – where anything that does not fit in the round hole of Silicon Valley VC-fueled business models must necessarily be outside of the realm of possibility (and imagination).
Not only he completely ignores the existence of broader fedi, but he also compares Mastodon to Peach – a centralized social network that quickly fizzled out.
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@rysiek He did have a point about people being hard to find though. Meanwhile it has improved a bit.