I’m a long time Mastodon user, and I’ve observed multiple cycles of user influxes (usually caused by some unpopular decision at Twitter) followed by slow but steady decline as these new users got frustrated, disappointed, attacked or something similar. Each wave however did leave a portion that stuck around. I can’t tell you whether Mastodon or Lemmy will “succeed”, but it’s clear by now that both their respective user bases couldn’t even agree on the definition of success.

This might sound like a negative, but if you look at corporate social media which has a pretty clear vision of what its own success looks like (is this fair?), it might also be partly positive. Also, while success might be hard to define and agree on in the Fediverse, I think that these networks are more resilient to total failure than traditional social media (though again, this statement hides some implicit assumptions).

Ultimately, I’ve learned to stop worrying about this. People will talk about what they want to talk about, and this will continue to change and evolve. Lemmy needs better moderation tools (as demonstrated by the recent CSAM attack), but I believe it will get them in time. If you want to talk about something different on Lemmy: do! Just post it, or create a community. It might not explode over night, but it might catch on.

Mastodon and now Lemmy are the only social media I actively use now (permanently deleted my Twitter account on the day the Tate interview was published “exclusively”, but was less active there for years) , and I feel the better for it. I’ve observed tremendous progress in the Fediverse during the past six years and it’s very encouraging in the long term.