Eight years ago Lance Ulanoff had a problem. William Shatner could not find him on Mastodon.

His distress is understandable, relatable even. Who wouldn’t want to be found by Captain Kirk himself! The way he dealt with that feeling of distress, however, was something different. He came to the conclusion that because Captain Kirk could not find him, Mastodon can’t survive.

You see, Lance Ulanoff, like most journalists writing about technology, understands tech. Like, really understands it. As an award-winning tech journalist and former Editor in Chief at PCMag-dot-com he knows the ins and outs of all corporate tech stacks. As I write this, the four latest pieces of his in TechRadar are pushing Microsoft hype like there is no tomorrow. All four published within the last two days.

That is the level of journalistic excellence and rate of creative output I know I could never even dream to attain.

And if you understand tech – like, really understand it – you must recognize, just as Lance Ulanoff had recognized, that some weird wannabe social network with no large corporation behind it and no VC money in the bank cannot work, should not work, will not work.

Ulanoff – a Tech and Social Media Expert, according to his fedi bio – gave six reasons that led him to his conclusion. First and foremost, he just didn’t like the name. Secondly, he completely missed the point of decentralization, calling instances “silos”. Third, he found the term “toot” objectionable. Fourth issue… not even sure what he meant here, I had a Mastodon account before his piece got published and handles were working just fine. Fifth, the Captain-Kirk-Can’t-Find-Me problem. Sixth, the fact that one has a choice of available mobile apps (how gauche!).

Based on all this, TechRadar’s current Editor at Large, whose latest pieces fawn over corporate AI chatbots as if they’re the best thing since sliced bread, delivers his sage verdict:

Mastodon cannot live on hype alone.

Eight years on, Mastodon – along with the rest of the Fediverse, of which Mastodon is but a part, and which Lance Ulanoff decided to wholly ignore of course, the seasoned tech journalist that he is – chugs along nicely.

Turns out what drives and sustains decentralized social media is not hype, but a sense of community and the possibility to have some real agency in one’s social media experience. This decentralization and sense of community allows Fediverse to survive even if individual instances disappear.

Which they sometimes do: at some point very soon, octodon.social, one of the oldest Mastodon instances – started, in fact, days before Lance Ulanoff published his piece – will shut down for good. People who had accounts on it have moved on to other instances by now, and thanks to how Fediverse works the social network fabric and relationships I had built with them over the years remain unperturbed. Had I had an Octodon account that was, inexplicably, followed by William Shatner, he wouldn’t even have noticed I moved.

That’s in stark contrast to, say, Google+, which despite corporate backing, incomparably larger budget, and being pushed down people’s throats through forced integration with YouTube, survived mere seven years, nine months, and a week.

And once it shut down, it shut down. A social network of millions just blipped out of existence one day. All those moments – lost in time, like tears in rain.

Google+, the presumptive Facebook killer, shows tremendous potential. As someone who warms up to any social network with the alacrity of a Galápagos tortoise, this, for me, is saying something.

– Lance Ulanoff wrote in 2011 about a corporate social network that ended up lasting shorter than a tiny fedi instance run by a volunteer.

So celebrate with me the annual Mastodon Won’t Survive Day. You can find me on the Fediverse.