Useful Masto thread on strategy.
We, the XMPP community, failed to capitalize on success by diversifying the network. It’s our own fault not enough nodes were there.
Not wrong in theory, but in this case, ridiculous. Everyone and their dog was running an xmpp server, but most had like 1 or 5 people.
You simply can’t make a node to compete with the likes of Google or Meta, unless you’re one of those companies.
All these posts about the huge growth rate of Mastodon and Lemmy are just funny in comparison with Threads. I hear Threads has something like 13 million users in a day or something?
The only times when a free and open concept wins, is if a) the closed-source behemoth royally fucks up so much that it’s obvious (like IE vs. Firefox), b) if a decently sized company appropriates it (like all the Linux servers, and possibly Steamdeck), or c) it gets a huge head start, and there isnt enough market to choke it to death (like Audacity)
Any other time, a corporation with enough money is gonna try EEE, and probably succeed. (Even Firefox isn’t doing so well since Chrome exists.)
If you want another example, look at Android. Oh look, open source, Linux based, so nice! We can do forks and ROMs and do anything with our phones!
Well with most phones you can’t do shit, at least not easily, and now even the fucking dialer app isn’t officially maintained anymore.
You can’t compete with a trillion $ behemoth if it decides to smother you. Don’t even start playing with it.
I hear Threads has something like 13 million users in a day or something?
I hear Threads has something like 13 million users in a day or something?
30 million by the end of Day 1, 70m by the end of Day 2, must be way over 100 million by now.
Let’s go with the Firefox vs Edge model. Zuckerberg will never respect your privacy and Meta will not adequately moderate. There’s a gap, we just need to get our toes stuck in it. Many, many toes.
A crucial difference between XMPP and ActivityPub is, I think, this:
A messaging protocol or platform like Email or XMPP or Signal is only useful if the people you want to converse with are on it. There’s no other reason to use it. This means you probably need to have some of the people you know personally on it before you want to use it.
However the two main types of ActivityPub apps are microblogging and link sharing. I don’t necessarily need to know anyone on Fedi to enjoy using these platforms. So the likelihood for these platforms to thrive and survive, and the resilience against them being killed by a single large actor defederating or shutting down is much higher.
I don’t necessarily need to know anyone on Fedi to enjoy using these platforms.
That depends what you use it for.
On Twitter I followed a lot of specialists in my field. On Reddit there were a lot of (anonymous) specialists in my field. Both were an important part of my working life, and it took two networks totalling ~half a billion people to deliver those few hundred people who made it so useful for me.
And that was also true for my niche hobbies and my niche leisure reading.
Small networks work well for some things. But not all things.
I say it all the time: decentralization is strength.
Yeah, I’m in agreement with this sentiment. Threads is an an opportunity as much as it is a threat for the Fediverse.
not enough nodes were there
And a bit later he mentions “Not just all account servers; different kinds of services”. I have a feeling this has been overlooked in the recent discussions about Threads. The fediverse is an excellent base to launch a myriad of varied kinds of services, not all of them “account servers” like lemmy, mastodon, pixelfed, etc. Let’s also build more bots and automated services too :3 It could be games played through fedi, it could be statistics, admin tools, and whatever comes to mind.
This is the kind of thing that would be added value even for huge account nodes, and would probably act as a deterrent to want to change the rules of the game (making changes to ActivityPub). If you change the proto, your users would lose access to all the nice things that exist outside of the instance, quite the backlash, like what happened with reddit.
What do you all think?
