At first I thought this was about the Pebble smart watch from 2012. Pretty confused how that becomes a Mastadon instance.
Does that make him the beeper king?
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/da065da2-adf1-4d60-8de0-dcef8f7d2809#xPeVIu-i.copy
I happened to notice an ex-Pebble user in my feed asking for Mastodon help, a couple weeks back. Had never heard of it, but I did some digging, found there was a whole group of them wandering around lost and confused, so reached out and welcomed them and offered help. Honestly they’re very nice people, it seems like Pebble’s whole “thing” was a focus on people being cool to each other so attracted that certain sort of user.
Proud to say I was nominated first post-Pebble member of Pebble club 😎
In its own small way, the story exemplifies just how much of a fracturing is happening right now outside of the ordinary corporation siloed ideas around social media. People are moving around and relatively freely.
Which is hopefully a pretty good sign for the idea of the fediverse and open protocols in general.
I’d say it’s a big maybe on the protocol side of things.
In general it’s an affirmation of the power of open source software to grow and change things, which we’ve seen before. Mastodon was lying there ready as a more or less plug and play platform. That’s powerful in a moment looking for alternative platforms.
Mastodon’s success IMO isn’t necessarily a success for or an indication of success for ActivityHub. At most, I’d say, it attracts more attention to the idea of open platforms and decentralised social web infrastructure. But the specific protocol being used, AP, isn’t really a big part of the picture, and might just be the weakest aspect of the current fediverse story.
To illustrate, pebble chose not to federate their original platform because the task was too hard. Ask developers and they’ll tell how true this is. So it seems false to say that the protocol on its own is making open and decentralised social media happen. The heavy lifting is coming from the software devs making platform software.
I had an account there. I never used, but I posted a few times just to see what it looked like.
The UI wasn’t bad, and if they have any resources left they should repurpose that UI on top of Mastodon.
They did, or at least made a theme for it.
How would you make money as a mastodon instance? Pay to be a member? I don’t see the incentive for the average user to pay when it’s so easy to join a free instance (I’m considering the average person doesn’t know how to host their own).
The incentive might become more apparent as time goes on.
- long term up-time commitments
- stability guarantees
- dedicated Moderation services
- dedicated help service
- performance guarantees
- additional features or parallel services beyond ordinary masto (eg search, blogging, feed sorting/algorithms, or even fusion of additional platforms like lemmy)
- active sponsorship of developers contributing back to masto
- subscription is part of a dedicated app too (see, eg, Mammoth)
As a Mastodon subscriber on a typical server, I haven’t found any of that to be particularly necessary. Perhaps there are some advanced users who might find it useful though. 
Interesting. I feel like long term stability, up time and performance would be valuable to many users. In many ways I’d say just going on to mastodon.social is a bit of a cop out as it heavily dilutes the decentralised structure that is arguably the point of all of this. Multiple paid instances would be healthier. And there, as a user on a relatively peripheral instance but one that is paid-for, longevity and stability become increasingly valuable.
Otherwise, instance providers putting the work into trying to provide a relatively “complete” fediverse palette of tools while making it as easy as possible for the users could also be interesting.
