There is a season…
Taking the back roads so we won't get weighed
We have been building the information super highway for several decades we saw the "Under Construction" part of webpages in the 1990s. Old roads are still remembered and taken when a major bridge is removed things can get dicey. The problems of Musk and Twitter are the disregard for historical solutions to problems. Mastodon is being tested by the masses as a replacement for Twitter, taking up the "tooted" and "federated" rhetoric.
EFNet IRC network
Eris is the Greek goddess of strife and discord. The first major IRC network was EFNet which stood for Eris Free Network. IRC attracted a series of hackers to attack the distributed server network as a game. The designers of Activity Pub which is the protocol that Mastodon is based on likely considered the problems of IRC networks during design.
Open Standards v. the Market
XMPP is an open protocol XML-based protocol. Many chat and messenger protocols have existed: ICQ, AIM, and IRC. Google Talk now dropped by Google propelled the adoption. While an XML text-based protocol seemed like the thing in the 1990s. The tech community did not support compatible chats with their proprietary systems.
Traffic cones
Taking on "the bird." and construction ahead.
Content moderation
Mastodon has rules for content moderation on a per-server basis. How will this scale with a large influx of new members is hard to tell, and will there be moderator burnout?
What about "the culture"?
Does "the culture" scale? Some of us bring our own culture from "the bird." The useful parts will survive while the other parts are discarded.
Work Crews
Many of the webpages of the World Wide Web of the 1990s had these yellow and orange cliche road-themed under-construction signs because the information super highway was being built. After the dot-com bust these things became less common. Twitter was and will always be in the construction zone, as is most of our global communications.
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US
Turn, turn, turn.