There's a few reasons I'm skeptical. For one they have an equally spotty reputation for arbitrary editorial policy while claiming to be completely agnostic. And secondly there have been a few stories about their distressed fiscal situation. They spent a load of VC money from the zero interest era on prominent writers. Far more than they'd bring in as revenue in the hopes they'd juice the brand. Classic strategy of selling dollars for 75 cents to get traction. Only they'd paid disproportionate amounts to some controversial writers which is, in essence, an editorial policy that speaks in dollars. They've also punished critics.
My general belief is that we won't get a better Twitter from VC world. I also have zero confidence in the Fediverse because it has no business strategy.
Honestly, my confidence in the Fediverse is in part because it has no business strategy. The tooling behind it is at the moment pretty much universally AGPL (a license which I don't think is very good but it seems to keep away big businesses). It probably won't reach mass-appeal outside of gradually amassing tech nerds, but at the same time... maybe that's for the better?
I dunno, I think a lot of the enshittification[0] of social media companies comes in part because of their business strategies. VCs demand eternal growth or an eventual buyout. Fedi doesn't have that incentive. The worst that can happen to it is what happened to e-mail, where you get a few nebulously large providers but it's still more than possible (although with e-mail, rather aggravating due to an outdated tech stack that we've bolted a bunch of asterisks onto to try and make it more suited for general use) to live outside that bubble and interact with that big provider bubble anyway.
My general belief is that we won't get a better Twitter from VC world. I also have zero confidence in the Fediverse because it has no business strategy.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/17/23309877/substack-forever...