There are many Mastodon servers run by ordinary people simply because they want to. And before the shit-show the internet has become, there were many forums and IRC channels, absolutely free, and with 0 ads.
replyVery low traction on these. Let me know when there’s something that people actually use in tens or hundreds of millions and random people are just providing the infrastructure out of pocket and spending all their time on this without expectation.
replyMaybe low traction is a good thing. We don’t need social media to be an all consuming addictive mega platform.
replyI could have agreed if the high traction ones that do all the bad things didn’t exist.
replyMoving the goalposts much? Of course there aren't any free services serving millions currently, how could they, when Facebook/X spends millions to make sure everyone stays on their platform? Which non tech savvy would want to move to a platform without all their friends? That's the gotcha with social networks, once you grow big enough, it is really hard for people to move off of it.
replyStill, funny how you ignored IRCs/forums that I mentioned. Those were used by MANY people, and could scale infinitely. You are literally arguing against something that has already happened.
> Still, funny how you ignored IRCs/forums that I mentioned. Those were used by MANY people, and could scale infinitely.
replyAt its peak (late 1990s to early 2000s), IRC was estimated to have about 3–4 million concurrent users worldwide at any given moment, with tens of millions of total users over time.
Pales in comparison with the scale that’s needed today, given the number of people, variety of media, and bandwidth required.
No I am not moving the goalposts, the alternative shouldn’t just exist it should actually do the job and by doing the job, I don’t mean that if people made the effort to use it, it can do the job. I mean people should be using it. Also, no people are not stupid and its not their fault for not using it.
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