rglullis

It's Fediverser. Yes, it is on github. Yes, I've posted about it, quite a bit.

I asked prolific users to join, I offered help to admins to set it up. I even offered the topic-specific instances to the wider community. None of these efforts were well received.

What’s stopping small businesses and influencers

There is nothing stopping them, but there is no one here that wants them to come:

• Scroll around for a bit on the federated timeline of your preferred Mastodon instance, tell me how long it takes for someone to display an anti-business sentiment.
• There is no one coordinated movement to get creators on YouTube and tell them "hey, if you start putting your videos on PeerTube we will contribute to your Patreon".
• Every and any effort to build a public searchable index of the Fediverse was attacked on the grounds of "I don't want my data used by marketers".
• The majority view on "how to best fund the Fediverse" is "set up donations". Whenever I bring up "I think it's more fair if everyone paid just a little bit, this is why my instance is only for paying members", I am immediately treated as an evil capitalist pig.

What reporters?

There were a number of reporters from the NYT/WSJ/CNN who set up Mastodon accounts in 2022 and were harassed on Mastodon.

Does this, by the way, not depend on the instance?

Do you think that Fediverse is a good representation of the overall political spectrum?

What “different people” is the Fediverse afraid of?

• Normies.
• Small business who want to have a social media presence.
• Influencers.
• Reporters.
• Anyone who is not 100% aligned with their political mindset

My biggest frustration is that I sincerely believe that I had built like 80% of the tools needed to solve the onboarding issues:

• Onboarding by signing up via Reddit OAuth on fediverser.network, so anyone had one single place to visit and "migrate"
• A website with a curated list of recommended communities, so that they would have content available as soon as they signed up.
• 15+ topic-specific instances, so that people could become familiar with the concept of federation, without having to be overwhelmed by the initial choices and/or being forced to understand the "politics" of each instance
• The "Community Ambassador" feature, to help people to organize and source content from different places and help them bootstrap their communities.

These things are all right there. There was no single admin interested in implementing it. Everyone was just looking at their own few thousand users and never got together to think "how can we get from 50k to 5 million?"

No idea.

People went to Mastodon and faced a number of UX issues:

• onboarding was difficult
• "Selecting an instance" is a chore
• How to find content
• No algorithmic recommendations

Because getting content was hard, they were basically thrown into a whole new ecossytem and were greeted by the OG Mastodon users, who were not at all welcoming: , complaining about "their space" being invaded, had many displays of "opression olympics", made a point of being extra loud about their extremist views as an attempt to scare normies, demanded everyone to learn "proper manners" right away, put content warnings on anything, etc.

In other words, people didn't go to Mastodon in 2024 because those that tried in 2022 were shunned away and left with the impression that the Fediverse is not for them.

I don’t know how you think the fediverse is somehow afraid of growth though.

For the reasons above. It's not that they are "afraid of growth", but the general culture on the Fediverse is reactionary and averse to change. Making it more universally appealing would mean bringing different people, and this is what they are afraid of.

I’m happy to be here regardless of whether we’re growing personally. In spite of Lemmy’s challenges I enjoy it here, and that’s enough for me.

I think this is a fine attitude if you are an user who just wants to enjoy a "slow web" kind of experience, but as someone aware of all the ill effects of Big Tech and Surveillance Capitalism, I wish we were more ambituous and aimed for a bigger slice of user share.

The Bluesky surge happened after a massive global election result and a massive grievance from progressives/leftists over Musk and how Twitter has become

Why didn't they go to Mastodon? (hint: some of them did in 2022)

If Reddit fucks up, as a reaction - Lemmy would get many new users.

Or perhaps there will be some other platform that is not so afraid of growth like Lemmy is, and people will go there, just like people went to Bluesky instead of going to Mastodon?

When I say "compromise", I am not saying "sacrifice them completely". I am talking about in terms of Big Fedi vs Small Fedi, regardless on where on the scale you want to stay, there are trade-offs to be made.

Bluesky itself is also flatlining and declining anyway.

Yeah, but my point is that they were a lot more effective in capturing mindshare when it was needed, and they didn't see growth as compromise on their values like people do here.

When the next fuckup from Big Tech comes around, do you think that people will think about going to Mastodon/Lemmy/PieFed, or they will just look at Bluesky?

If you are keen on working on something like that, let me know. I've done some preliminary work to get a DID system that would work like did:plc but I got a bit stuck trying to use a decentralized database based on IPFS as the "ledger" mechanism.

But why are you comparing Bluesky's numbers with Lemmy's. A more apt comparison would be against the whole Fediverse. We had ~2 million people in early 2023, and we've gone down since then.

I guess u could have a meta id that dereferences to all ur actor ids?

Yes, that would be ATProto's did:plc system.