It seems the fediverse is continuing and growing again. Line go up is probably good!
https://fediverse.observer/stats&months=50
Total users are huge now.
There are many websites out there that pull data from the fediverse. So take that with a grain of salt. But anecdotally I am seeing a small rise in people using the various platforms as each get more mature and servers somewhat stabilize.
It just seems like this system is capitalism with extra steps, but the extra steps involve replacing the exchange of money with the peddling of influence. The capitalists are replaced by administrators, the hierarchy of wealth is replaced by rank in the decision-making apparatus. I get that it's supposed to be democratic and protect the interests of the public, but so too is our regulated hybrid public-private system and we see how well that's going. It also seems like, where our market system began as distributed and decentralized, which was a strength, and began to be ever more concentrated as businesses consolidated and corrupted government, this new system starts consolidated and married to government. A lot of people would say this is too much power in the hands of the state, and ripe for theft by an autocrat. I'm not saying it's impossible for this to work, but the systems I have seen work best are those where the market does what it does and the government reigns in its worst tendencies when the motive of profit conflicts with the needs of people.
The key disconnect is that the state itself is a product of the base of society. Marxists do not posit that we should merely merge with existing government and take it over, but smash the state apparatus and replace it outright. The capitalist systems of today, despite having a public sector, are entirely controlled by capitalists. The socialist states of today and the future, despite having private sectors, are thoroughly controlled by workers. Look at Cuba, and what it's able to achieve despite incredible blockade and sanctions. Look at China, where the underdeveloped parts are marketized and the developed parts are public, they even have a handy chart on what socialist construction looks like:
This is where philosophy comes in. Right now, your analysis is metaphysical. You see that in the past the market was more decentralized, and now that it is highly decentralized, you are trying to work backwards. This isn't how human societies progress, though. This new economic base that capitalism has created is already compatible with planned, social ownership. There is no such thing as a static system that is not evolving into something.
Dialectics helps us understand that capitalism has already played its progressive role, and that now it's time for workers, who already run the world, to take charge of it and own it. Marxism is a more scientific way of viewing the world than liberalism allows for, because metaphysics traps us in outdated forms of science, just like evolution proved older, metaphysical forms of biological categorization to be incorrect.