Great article. I skimmed some parts and close-read others and didn’t find anything to disagree with. “People are quite adept at making compromises on their beliefs for the sake of utility or pleasure” especially hit home. This is why my middle of the road and even progressive-minded friends continue to use Twitter: they can create a permission structure that allows it.

UX, UX, UX. When a massive group of people wants to leave a platform, there must be an intuitive, thoughtfully designed, reasonably available alternative available that moment. Platforms like Mastodon make users feel full of questions. They feel lost. They go back where they came from because at least things made sense there, even if the guy running it is a proudly heartless lunatic.

The Digg migration — no hashtag back then — succeeded because there was such an alternative: Reddit. I agree with you that the closed source nature of the software didn’t factor and won’t factor for 99% of users. We just want a place where the product decisions are made differently.

So far I think Kbin is okay. I came here, I joined, and I never think about other servers or instances. It looks and feels a lot like Reddit. I don’t care about followers, so there isn’t some count to give me anxiety about having something mid-configured.