I’ve been arguing for over 2 years now that the actual value proposition of the fediverse is Community+. There are several Lemmy and Mastodon instances that are built around this – tenforward.social is a Star Trek themed and focused Mastodon site, where the vast majority of local chatter is focused on Star Trek, and startrek.website, beehaw.org, midwest.social, ttrpg.network, etc. are all community or interest focused Lemmy-based websites – and they all seem to actually work in that model. People aren’t signing up to the Star Trek Lemmy site to talk primarily about Call of Duty or American politics. They get their Star Trek community, and they can engage in those general interest discussions that are being hosted elsewhere, and everybody wins.

The key to growth, then, really is getting enough special interest and community websites up and running on the fediverse, and letting people discover the the power of being connected to people on other social media websites without having to sign up over there, too.

If Bluesky was using ActivityPub, there’d be no issue here right now. We’d all be able to get Community+Bluesky and be all the happier for it. But they’ve created their own system that’s prohibitively expensive for the average person to utilize without having a direct connection to Bluesky’s hardware, meaning the control forever remains in the hands of corporate interests and the rich. And that’s just a play at being the next Amazon. We’re either locked out, or we’re under their thumb. And that’s not really where any of us who are engaged with this fediverse project wanted to be.