I tried to replace Twitter by Mastodon but, in the end, I just left Twitter and don’t use Mastodon at all. The main reason I think is because the « onboarding » is painful. I never succeeded to find interesting people to follow. I faced many ghost accounts from people posting once a month or stopped a few years ago.
If you don’t find people by yourself, no one is going to see your posts and so, you won’t be able to find new people to follow by posting.
I don’t like what Twitter became, but the base principle of the algorithm (before it became X with the paid subscriptions) was working great for me. I was constantly adding new people to the mix, and removing inactive ones every month.
If I struggled this much with Mastodon, I am not surprised many people create an account and leave a few days / weeks later.
I do not think they should be afraid of Analogue. It’s not like they release a new machine in 2 weeks. Also, they much prefer to sell 1 machine per console rather than an all-in-one machine.
Regardless of what they have, as a consumer, the SuperSega looks like a vaporware. It’s a very ambitious project and we have almost nothing that confirms they are able to build such machine.
Analogue is also very bad when communicating, but they have a good-enough track record (at least hardware-wise, software is usually bare-bones at launch).