Even if Mastodon and other Fediverse platform gains are 1% of the gains of BlueSky or anything else, it’s still cause for celebration and to welcome new friendly faces with open arms.

When the Reddit API-calypse happened, I don’t think anyone expected Lemmy to have more users than Reddit or anywhere even close to a similar number. But Lemmy.ca went from around 40 active users in April 2023 to hundreds, and then to 2k over 3 months, most people being friendly and ready for something different.

Quantity isn’t everything. There is an innumerable amount things that could be better about Mastodon and sure, mass-adoption could help with niche content. However the way the Fediverse is set up, it is resistant to all the sacrifices other platforms had to make in the long run to be more profitable. Musk-boi could “buy” Mastodon and Zucker-bot could “buy” Pixelfed tomorrow, but that wouldn’t stop anyone from forking those two platforms and leaving the main instances. The distributed nature makes it hard for a monopolist to capture.