Fediverse

I'm happy with the current rate of progress. As it is, I easily spend way more time than I probably should talking to people here almost exclusively about a very niche topic. I don't need this place to be a be-all, end-all. I just come here to have nice conversations with whoever is around.

It’s certainly not from a lack of user interest. Search terms like “facebook alternatives” have absolutely skyrocketed to unprecedented levels in the last couple years

Your certainty will be the mistake here. What does "skyrocketed" mean? From 10 search requests to 100? J/K. But: Is it more than the 1% of users? I doubt it. Most people are not interested at all in stuff like this. They go where everybody is, simple as that.

So go figure:

99% of atoms in existence are Hydrogen and Helium. And yet here we are.

I mean, sure, you can chase MAU numbers all you want (please don't). The reality is that people are too lazy, busy, or overwhelmed to invest even two minutes' thought/effort (for many people those are the same thing) into trying alternatives. And that's okay - it's going to have to be, because it's not going to change. And if it did, then that type of person would be all up in your federated network.

Personally, if 25 million normies joined microblogging fedi, I'd probably leave. I like microblogging fedi small & weird. The vibe on Bluesky is rancid as fuck and that's where a lot of the normies went when Twitter got rebranded as a Nazi bar. Anyway, microblogging fedi is thriving based on the metric I care about, namely interesting conversations and interesting stuff to look at and people engaging with my project accounts.

But if you want to talk the whys and wherefores - the Mastodon "dev process" is the single biggest impediment to Mastodon being, you know, good. And that's a direct outgrowth of the mentality of the people who run it. Could I elaborate? Maybe. But (regardless of what my account info says) I've been on fedi more than 10 years, and I'll just say, you'll have to look into that yourself. Mastodon is not good software, and it's not going to become good software. And many if not most of the other microblogging fedi platform apps are just not trying to have mass appeal. It's not a goal of those projects. If you want it to be, you'll probably have to fork one or build one from scratch.

I hear there are similar issues with Lemmy and with Piefed. Personally, I'm posting from a Lemmy account, but I'll be taking a much closer look at Piefed when I get my shit together to set up my own node. I don't know if Piefed is trying for mass appeal or not, but even if the devs are, the federated nature of the threadiverse is by definition going to make it conceptually a bit harder to engage with, because there is necessarily going to be 15 communities for every topic, and that's by design and working as intended. Federated social media was never going to be as "easy" to use as centralized megacorp social media, and will never be, and that's by design, and that's okay. It's going to have to be, or you'll need to switch to a centralized model.

I don't think the Fediverse will surpass mainstream social media by any means. I genuinely don't believe there will be a day where any Fediverse platform will reach even a tenth of the userbase of its mainstream counterpart.

The current trend of Fediverse platforms seems to operate in this way: "make X ActivityPub compatible" where X is any existing or emerging mainstream platform. A good example is Loops which, I feel is completely disconnected from the TikTok userbase that it attempts to capture. TikTok is very popular precisely because of its addictive algorithm and I'm not sure if the ethics of Loops will follow in that direction.

Although the Fediverse population is small, I think it's pretty resilient at least. We're all here because of a shared ideal of "social media" that isn't owned by a single entity. Unless users outside the Fediverse share the same ideal, it is unlikely they'll stick around.

The three problems listed on your post have pretty much been the same for the past three years and I don't think anyone has made a good solution for it (otherwise, it would have blown up by now). There are so many suggestions like making a quiz or choosing a random instance but we all know those come with their own flaws. I don't know how many years it will take for us to solve this problem but I'm always happy to see new attempts at solving them. The funny thing though is that some of these solutions rely on centralization...

However, in my opinion, I think we are approaching the Fediverse wrong. The current expectation is it to eventually replace mainstream social media (it won't). There is an obsession with a grand narrative or even a utopia.

In my opinion, the "new" problem of the Fediverse should be this:

"How do you build a platform with decentralization first in mind?"

If we start thinking about this question, then problems like "choosing a server" should be irrelevant. I think about this question almost every day and I'm always on the look out for new platforms (both Fediverse and non-Fediverse) that hopefully aren't just "X but ActivityPub". I hope there will be more effort put into developing a platform where choosing an instance isn't thought to be a hindrance but is actually part of the experience. A platform where we aren't actively trying to "hide" decentralization.

The question might sound stupid for some but just try to think about how we're always chasing after mainstream social media and never really coming up with something original and unique where features are designed around decentralized interactions first.

I don't have the answers to this problem but I hope we can change the way we think about the Fediverse.