Fediverse

Is the Pillowfort community discussing a collective move to the Fediverse, to someplace in the Fediverse that is not Mastodon, to someplace in the Fediverse that has largely got the same features as Tumblr?

My personal experience, and I've got a lot of personal experience in this, is that free, open-source, decentralised alternatives are vastly less well-known than those think who know them inside-out.

Most of the time, when people are forced to escape a centralised silo, they tend to move to another centralised silo instead. For it's the centralised silos that are well-known because it's them that tend to have advertisement budgets, it's them that know best how to manipulate Google by SEO means, and it's them that mass media and/or tech media prefer to talk and write about because they're easier to understand.

The majority of Mastodon users don't know anything about the Fediverse beyond Mastodon. For them, the Fediverse is Mastodon. If they had any reason to move away from Mastodon, they'd be stuck between joining Bluesky, going back to X or staying on Mastodon because they don't have the foggiest idea of what else the Fediverse itself has to offer that might suit them better.

Outside of the Fediverse, knowledge about the Fediverse is dominated by

• not even having heard of Mastodon, much less the Fediverse
• having heard of Mastodon, but not of the Fediverse
• having heard of Mastodon and thinking Mastodon is the Fediverse

Another example: Flashback to the early 2010s. People wanted to leave Facebook for greener pastures that didn't snoop on them as egregiously. At first they went nowhere because "there was nowhere to go". Then, when Google+ was launched, they went to Google+. Sure, it was a Google product that definitely would snoop on them. But hey, at least it wasn't Facebook, and Google would probably snoop less than Facebook! Besides, "there was nowhere else to go".

All regardless of diaspora* existing. All regardless of diaspora* shaking up mass media in summer 2010 when the four devs announced a free, non-commercial "Facebook killer" and asked for $12,000 of crowdfunding to develop it, and they got over $200,000. (This is also why the only people who know that Google+ was an all-out diaspora* rip-off are current or former diaspora* users.) All regardless of Friendica existing.

Considering all this, chances that the Pillowfort community has heard of Wafrn are next to nil.