Journalism does several things.

One of those is to inform and report. But in doing so, it almost always tries to fit events into an existing narrative.[1]

And the existing narrative of the past decade-and-a-half of online systems, with very few exceptions, has been privately-owned, for-profit, walled-garden, advertising-supported social networks. Mastodon is sufficiently disruptive that "John Mastodon" was invented out of whole cloth to match the terrain to the existing map:

Then, the platform removed John Mastodon, the founder of a competing social media company named after himself, for posting a link to the jet tracker's Mastodon account.

<https://boingboing.net/2022/12/18/mastodon-users-embrace-col...>

Note the mappings:

- "John Mastodon" is created as a figurehead.

- And as a "founder" ...

- Of a "competing social media company" (itself three sub-mappings)

I can understand how someone doing a sloppy hot-take could make those errors. But it also speaks to not having the narrative language to comprehend the reality. We don't understand what we don't have language for, "I'll see it when I believe it" also becomes "I'll see it when I understand it". That this afflicts those we rely on to tell the story is all the more problematic.

(Camouflage works on a similar basis: <https://polination.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/animal-camo-l...>)

I saw Newitz's comment and immediately replied (without checking the thread):

By "impossible to use", what they of course mean is "impossible to use to monopolize, monetize, and commit massive fraud with".

<https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/109560464904178130>

... and quickly realised I was being anything but original on the thread.

I've been in the tech orbit long enough to have seen multiple cycles of "tech is hard and can't be easily communicated", dating to the Apple II and Commodore Pet systems. By the mid-1980s, I was using uni campus Unix servers to write papers (formatted in nroff!!!) and communicate with my LDR grilf via email and talk(1) over a 56k leased-line network.

I've seen mainframes, minis, PCs, the Internet, email, Usenet, FTP, the Web, Unix, Linux, mobile phones, smartphones, Twittr, and His Noodliness Knows What Else described as some esoteric geek-infused arcana up until the point it isn't.

Two particular memories are of seeing a URL on a can of shaving creme ~1997, and of being in a bookstore (remember those) circa 1999 listing to a mother and young daughter talking about a new friend she'd met with her mother asking if they'd exchanged email addresses. Both were spillovers of my tech world into meatspace.

Twitter ... has long been niche, relatively little-used, and fairly misunderstood itself. Searching phrases such as "I don't understand twitter" reveals many thousands of results. Facebook itself was largely niche until about 2010. Where both did become significantly adopted wasn't through argument, and probably benefitted relatively little from onboarding, but when they became where the conversation or interaction was, and people and organisations found that that's where they needed to be. Not necessarily everyone (I've avoided both), but a large and dominant fraction of online discourse.

If Mastodon and the Fediverse become widely adopted, then it will be due to similar dynamics.

And journalists will likely have found their narrative by that point.

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Notes:

1. A great book detailing this is Edward Jay Epstein's News from Nowhere. It discusses the production of television news circa 1974, though much of the journalistic element applies to other media as well (including voice and video over the Internet). <https://archive.org/details/newsfromnowheret00epst> <http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=14C940300F3D0EA68652013E...>