Comment on Is the Fediverse stalling?

• db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Network effects are incredibly strong. Twitter is a disinformation and fascist hellhole, and yet people who should know better still refuse to leave. We have the advantage that we’re not growth focused, so we can can bide our time. The inevitable enshittification will do its job eventually, but there’s no telling when the tipping point will happen.

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  • rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Network effects are incredibly strong

    Yet, Bluesky has grown to 35M+ active accounts, even though the came way after us

    We have the advantage that we’re not growth focused

    This is not an “advantage”. This is an excuse we tell ourselves to cope with our failures.

    The inevitable enshittification will do its job eventually,

    And when it does, the majority of people will go the next shiny “free as in beer”, VC-funded siloed platform and we are going to be just another “They don’t know” meme.

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    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Not gonna argue with you mate, I know we disagree fundamentally on what the fediverse means. Me and most others never will see eye to eye with you with your capitalist growth-focused approach.

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      • rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Me and most others

        The “most others” here is a heavily self-selected group of people who don’t want to compromise on any of their values and treat any effort to grow as a threat.

        All of this to say, it’s fine if you say “Yes, we are small and I want it that way because if it gets any bigger we will be surrounded by people who do not uphold the same values we do”. The problem is that you’re arguing “We are only small because of $random_reason (network effects/evil capitalists/not enough funding/etc)”, as if “being small” was determined by external factors and not something that you can control.

        That’s the point of disagreement. I think we can control this and we can bring more people here, but it’s just that you don’t want to do it if means sacrificing your ideology.

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    • Skavau@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      When do you think Bluesky started? It was already a known place by many before the 2024 US election, and was founded by the ex-Twitter co-founder. The people behind it were several orders of magnitude more well known.

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      • rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        When do you think Bluesky started?

        It was announced in 2019 as an internal Twitter project, but it became its own thing in 2021-ish. Then they spent two years reinventing a bunch of things so that they could keep Twitter’s original view - i.e, a system where they could delegate all the boring/liability heavy parts to users (identity, UGC) while keeping them in control of rent-seeking toll gates (the AppView).

        The people behind it were several orders of magnitude more well known.

        It takes more than money and a good contact network to build something that can attract people. Jack nowadays is pushing for Nostr, but as a product it is a lot less appealing to the masses compared to Bluesky.

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    • Eyekaytee@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      As explained by the user below

      capitalist growth-focused approach

      Communities growing in size is for capitalist pig dogs!

      We here at the communist-iverse prefer to die slowly with brief spurts of new users when a more popular platform makes changes before they leave again

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      • Skavau@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Tbf Idk what you imagine Lemmy can somehow do to entice new people

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• Cris_Color@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I mean everyone already has platforms they’re largely comfortable with and fediverse platforms are less accessible, smaller, and usually clones of existing formats. The primary place we compete is on not being total dogshit, so when people can forget that their comfortable platforms are dogshit, it doesn’t surprise me that people wouldn’t be going out of their way to venture out into a new unfamiliar thing, with a different culture and much smaller userbase 🤷‍♂️

  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.

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  • Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Always cool to see you around!

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    • Cris_Color@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Always lovely to see you too blaze, hope you’re doing well ☺️

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      • Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Doing well, thanks!

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  • rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    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.

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    • Cris_Color@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I am broadly in favor of growing the Fediverse, but I am also of the belief that most of the ways that people thing that should be done, are potentially more counter productive than productive

      For users, most people think of growing Lemmy as evangelizing. Personally I think that’s almost always experienced as preachy and antagonistic. The real work of making the fediverse competive is the developers maintainers and hosters, and if we as users want the fediverse to grow I think the biggest thing we can do is be a part of making this a good place to be.

      Its by creating a culture that when people show up and try things out on a whim, they decide to stay. It certainly helps for people to hear about the Fediverse, but if that’s a accomplished through means that make people frustrated and hostile towards us, I think we’ve accomplished more harm than good.

      I deeply miss the thriving small niche communities of reddit, and us not being able to sustain that is 100% down to not having enough users, but I see participating in a way that makes it worth being here as the biggest thing I can do to support the fediverse

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      • rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        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?”

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• Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  The horrors persist, but so should we

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• sentient_loom@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I honestly think self-righteousness pushes people away. It’s why I can barely stand bluesky. During the big exodus from reddit, all these so-called far-lefties (who I think were just reddit goons doing infiltration) were all screaming for everybody to defederate. Even now, I keep arguing against idiots posting “kill a cop” or “kill fascists” memes, like this is literally an “advocate violence” platform. I don’t expect to pull big numbers with that kind of shit.

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  • rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Yeap, 100%. The extremists and the terminally online are overrepresented here, and that keeps the masses away.

    I’d suggest though to not waste your time arguing with the self-righteous idiots and just focus on bringing more normie-friendly content.

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  • Cris_Color@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Yeah we do have a lot of people who feel it’s more important to demonstrate their anger than to figure out what people could do to improve the problems.

    Worse still, a lot of people seem to have convinced themselves that whatever makes it most clear they’re angry and hurts the people they disagree with the most is actually what’s most productive. The anger about the state of things, particularly in the US is entirely valid. The self-justification of behaviours that burn bridges and radicalize more people is not.

    If you want to implement any kind of solution you do, necessarily have to have a critical mass of people who agree with you, and you cannot build that by antagonizing anyone who doesn’t already share your exact flavour of left wing ideology, and acting in a way that reflects poorly on your ideology to everyone except people who already agree with you

    Very rarely is anyone willing to confront that violence as a means to an end, pragmatically, has enormous costs, and that employing it just because you’re (justifiably) angry, is almost always detrimental to the exact abouts you’re mad about

    (Sorry, I know I kinda went off track from exactly what you were talking about, this is just a closely related huge frustration of mine)

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    • sentient_loom@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      violence as a means to an end, pragmatically, has enormous costs,

      The people I’m talking about (the worst ones) don’t even have an “end.” No plan at all. The violence is the end. It’s pure stupidity. I see it as the lust for violence, coming up with some politics to justify itself.

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      • Cris_Color@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        I agree. Its very frustrating, as someone who cares deeply about trying to do anything I can to find a future for myself in the increasingly broken status quo the US is devolving into (and has been in for a long time, albiet to a lesser extreme)

        But don’t you worry, they’ll tell themselves the whole while that they’re the righteous one for advocating wanton violence. I want off this ride :(

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    • OpenStars@piefed.social ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Enshittification often serves as a driver towards that behavior. However, while this platform has attempted to leave the former behind, it is not always so simple to actually accomplish that lofty goal. i.e. even if the ultimate disease is now cured, the symptoms themselves still persist, feeding forward by influencing others to continue with those old, bad habits.

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      • Cris_Color@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Yeah, I guess social media has, in effort to build maximum engagement, really shaped a lot of people’s way of engaging with others in deeply toxic ways that will be very hard to untangle and change now that the social forces that teach us how to act towards one another have been hijacked for monetary gain, and people have spent so much time exposed to that :(

        Thank you for sharing your thoughts, it gave me some new things to think about, and maybe it will help me set aside my frustration and remember my empathy when dealing with those people, at least more often. Because if I want to enact change I also need to build a critical mass of people who share my perspective.

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• Endmaker@ani.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  How about more marketing efforts? Buying ads?

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  • rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Who is going to pay for those ads? With what money? There is no single entity here with enough interest in growing the Fediverse, and any grassroots movements that we do have are strictly against commerce.

    The Lemmy devs would be making more money if they went to work for Uber Eats than as software developers, and I barely manage to convince people to pay $2.50/month to offer a professional hosting service.

    We don’t really need to “buy ads” to grow. We just need to get more people willing to invest in it.

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    • 3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.com ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I run bespoke hosting and services and people are spending less and less each month. Been doing it for 30 years in various ways and forms and 2025 is by far the hardest year to get anyone to part with money. Everybody thinks they should setup something ad laden it to death, make a fortune and retire at 30. Here in the UK you should visit a loc(ish) new website and see the content disappear behind a torrent of ads, clickbait articles, AI videos etc.

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  • Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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