Sadly I think he’s probably right. If you’re tech-savvy it can sometimes be easy to forget that a lot of people aren’t, and IMO Mastodon is probably too complicated for the average person.
My mother is 80 years old and she is the least tech-savvy person I know. I have learned a lot about designing software just by watching her struggle to use her various devices.
> Like Wordpress, the best way to use Mastodon is to pay a company to run it for you.
Right. And no one self-hosts Wordpress. Ok.
> There should be a single binary, self-updating, single-user instance.
This sounds like a suicide mission. You can already set this up in the current system, why does it need to be more popular?
I'm a monthly active user of Mastodon. It's boring, and if it was anything else then I'd quit using it. I don't want monitization, IPOs or Zuckerberg taunting. I want my peace and quiet so you can go dogfood the media du-jour.