Clarification: Mastodon is bound to fail

What did I mean by saying “Mastodon is bound to fail”? How do I define failure? Financially? Going to fall apart and die? Nope, neither of that. I was talking about purpose.

The term social network is ambiguous. It may refer to a graph (the data structure, linking people together) or a constructor, responsible for building that graph (e.g. the telephone system, email, a trade show…). This means. the success of a social network is measured by the size of the graph, the constructor can build, in relation to the total number of people that are eligible to join.

Accordingly, a general purpose social network is a success when it goes mainstream.

Mastodon is not mainstream and a lot of it’s users (which are part of the constructor) even seem to prefer it that way. So, there, hope that clarifies things.