Can Big Social just swoop in and take over the Fediverse on a whim?

Realistically, that can't happen.

1. Pivoting a big business is like captaining an aircraft carrier: it is slow and takes deliberation
2. Most businesses don't like to kill their cash cow, and the network effect that they own is their cash cow
3. Big Social itself is in disarray and doesn't have the wherewithal to make good strategic decisions

And there's other reasons too! 🧵

Big Social are no longer the innovators they were.

In actuality, for the past 10 years, most innovations in social media have been created by small, nimble players—which Big Social then attempts to either acquire or copy.

In essence, they've replaced R&D with M&A.

Thus, they probably have nothing new to add to the Fediverse.

The Fediverse is one thing that Big Social cannot acquire or copy.

No one owns the Fediverse, so that's not an option.

And to copy or integrate the Fediverse is to kill their own cash cows.

In essence, the Fediverse targets the chunk in their armour.

Big Social is obsessed with metrics, and proving value through metrics.

What metrics prove the Fediverse's value?

No one knows. Every metric regarding the Fediverse is at best conjecture. Nobody even knows its true size.

Hard to convince a CEO to buy into an idea when nothing is probable through metrics.

Nobody has validated the Fediverse as a place to make money.

Sure, tiny web-hosts might charge for services, but the average Big Social executive isn't looking to make tiny increases in a new venture. They want to 100x or 1,000 their ROI.

Somebody might eventually try this, but Big Social isn't going to be first.

Yes, Big Social has more than enough money and tech to upset the Fediverse.

What they don't have is the capacity to onboard knowledge about the Fediverse quickly and easily.

This is because the actual inner workings of the Fediverse are held by only a small handful of people.

Believe it or not, most people who work at Big Social are *not* social media nerds, and have zero interest in how the technology works.

When they look at Mastodon, their response is pretty much the same as everyone else's: they throw up their hands and say, "This is too complicated!"

And then they close their browser tab.

The only way Big Social challenges the Fediverse is through small competing skunkworks projects.

Which has actually happened with Jack Dorsey's Blue Sky project.

And to be honest, I'm skeptical about Blue Sky for many reasons—which I may talk about in a separate thread.

But more to the point, Blue Sky has been around for 4 years—and why aren't we using Blue Sky?

@atomicpoet They do not know how to extract money if they Federate too. That is what is holding up the Blue Sky development in my honest opinion.

@darnell @atomicpoet
They were stalled arguing about blockchain for almost all that time.

Dorsey took over, and they have since basically all but abandoned any blockchaininess, released a couple of papers, and got some test code running.

Their plans are ambitions and unproven, and seem to amount to still having algorithms written by advertisers deciding what you see. Just you get to pay to pick which advertisers wrote the algorithm.

I think they wasted 3 years and are now doing work but I don't think their incentives and aims are for the communal good.

@pre @darnell There's another plain matter: I don't think Dorsey's investing a lot of money on Blue Sky. The people who work there either don't have the time to work on basic things like DNS management *or* they're just asleep at the wheel.

Which doesn't bode well for the future of the project.