Ambitions

Written Nov 20, 2022, tagged under post

This is your friendly reminder that you don't need to aim for the stars for every single thing you do. If you set up a book shop, you don't need a plan for world domination of the book trade; it's okay just to sell books, and make some friends along the way. Enjoy playing music, starting a band? Go for it - being an active member of the music scene will be interesting and rewarding, and it isn't necessary to have plans to top the billboard round the world. These things might happen, but it isn't necessary, and you haven't "failed" if they don't.

I mention this because there's a lot of chat going on around the fediverse about Mastodon, Twitter and their goals. One particular troll I came across was saying that Mastodon would never replace Twitter and make masses of money. This implies an assumption that success is synonymous with world domination and wealth accumulation - one that I don't hold with.

Lots of tech businesses basically try to take an idea and "make it scale" in a way that is very profitable, by making revenues scale faster than costs. This often means centralising certain aspects and providing a repeatable, cookie-cutter process to make it easy to scale up, to achieve the profit that is the measure of success.

But human interactions don't always scale in the same way, and the nature of federation is also arguably anti-scaling. I suspect the fediverse ecosystem is healthy when it hasn't been centralised but instead there are many small instances, clustering together according to their social and ethical stances. Also, our attention doesn't scale; we can't drink through a bigger and bigger firehose, and there's a limit to what we can take on. And finally, our success metric relates far more to friendships, relationships, conversation and the other kinds of things that all happy humans engage in day to day.

So we shouldn't be trying to "be the new Twitter", but rather throw out inappropriate success metrics and work towards what people enjoy and appreciate. Let's have technology and business serve people, rather than the other way round.

Photo by Ricardo Arce on Unsplash