On the Mastodon Experiment
Users are claiming to leave Twitter over their disagreements with Musk and switching to a decentralized (federated) alternative called Mastodon.
I played around with Mastodon in 2017, and my reviews were fairly negative. It was slow, inconsistent, and had a worse user experience than Twitter. However, I think the product makes interesting trade-offs relevant today in the context of other domains, i.e., crypto.
Some observations
Users don't want to host their own servers. Even the most technical ones. SaaS is the optimal solution. I'm an avid believer in running open-source software and controlling your own destiny, but for the vast majority of services, I don't want to manage it.
Moderation and user experience vary from instance to instance. It's hard to sustain at scale. In practice, decentralized moderation ends up as a series of fiefdoms without accountability (e.g., if you don't like it, find another server).
Chronological vs. algorithmic feeds. While many users claim they want chronological feeds, algorithmic feeds are clearly the future (see TikTok). More content means a greater need for curation. Curation works best at scale when data can be analyzed in aggregate. While Twitter's algorithmic feed is subpar at best, a chronological feed seemed worse.
Decentralize vs. centralization is a trade-off and brings a new set of problems in exchange for solving a different set. It's an interesting experiment to see where users land.