Don’t get me wrong I’m a big fan but it seems like the fediverse could theoretically exist with like 5 users whereas a commercial company needs users for revenue. It feels like we are using the masters tools to try to destroy the masters house
A lot of community types just simply don’t work without a minimum critical mass of members.
Imagine asking a programming question on a software development community of just 5 people. You end up with 3 people who aren’t active enough to see the question, 1 person sees but doesn’t have an answer and doesn’t respond (classic lurker), and one person sees it and responds that they don’t know the answer. Now imagine a community of 5 thousand people…it’s suddenly much more feasible to even bother asking the question.
Sure, fediverse could exist with just 5 people, but it would be worthless and pointless.
I think the biggest deal about Fediverse is it gives users control instead of companies. Most of social networks are controlled by big tech companies, the fact Fediverse can’t be controlled by companies but users makes me feel commited to it. Fediverse could be as good as we want.
I think I understand your comment, so my question is why are so many people up in arms about Threads taking over or destroying the Fediverse?
It’s about the network effect. As it stands now, the network effect is built on the backs of many different nodes on the network all contributing together.
But as you’ve seen, the amount of people on the network is nothing compared to the total of all the Threads users (~30mil). Once they federate with the rest of the network they will provide a MASSIVE boost to it’s enharent value. As people from other instances connect with friends, brands and public figures and alert services on Threads they are slowly becoming dependent on that content.
The users on Threads are not going to be as privacy or technology curious. Almost all of them will be existing Instagram users. They’re not going to move to another instance, especially if they can’t keep using the threads app, which could have features the other instances don’t support.
Almost all social media platforms have this network effect because they were first and/or strategically built their network.
Facebook utilized Universities, requiring uni email address to register and they had features that made it easy to connect with your classmates. Once they hit a critical mass they opened it public.
Twitter piggy backed off of the 2007 SXSWi conference. Displaying pubic Twitter feeds from users at the event on large LCD TVs, they connected users with a similar occupation and intrist. Sending their tweets per day from 20,000 to 60,000.
Threads is building it’s network on the back of Instagram while also on the back of Twitters failings. They’re co-opting the bad vibes of Elon Musk to syphon users off the platform.
Ultimately, there will be a short term boon in the perceived “value” of the fediverse, and in reality, Threads and Meta will make up a large percentage of that value. Over time, people will have become accustomed to the content Threads provides and when Meta nolonger needs to be federated, people will leave with them.
There are many different visions for “success” of decentralized projects, some of which require/imply explosive growth and some do not. There are also some goals, such as diversity and inclusivity, which can have complicated relationships with the concept of “growth.”
I want all kinds of people (that are NOT BIGOTS) to be join the fediverse, participate safely and form their own communities[1].
To achieve this, it’s beneficial for it to be easy for folks to join the fediverse at all, e.g., being able to easily find an instance and sign up for an account and not worry about the infrastructure or instance politics, and critically to be able to easily find one another and interact. These are also features that just fuel userbase growth generally.
But to sustain it, it’s necessary to have strong moderation (which in turn requires a manageable workload for mods) and to keep large pools of bad actors in check. It’s also important on a safety basis for many users to be less discoverable because high discoverability of marginalized users results in high rates of harassment by bigots. These are features that support a better and safer experience for people who are in the fediverse.
These things are directly in tension, which makes it very difficult to have a healthy fediverse. The result on Mastodon has been a bifurcation of “successful” (by different definitions) instances into, on the one hand, very large but poorly moderated instances with garbage fire local timelines but lots of people and lots of content to interact with, and, on the other hand, smaller, well moderated instances that flourish internally but can be hard to join or to interact with if you’re on one of the large instances.
Both models exert exclusionary forces in their own ways. If you keep everyone in your federation, and that includes nazis, then you are de facto participating in driving people who are targeted by nazis off of the network. But if your happy little closed instances are impossible to join and has a constraining monoculture, then a lot of other nice folks may get left out.
There’s not an easy solution to this. The situation for lemmy will be similar in some ways and different in others. The piece that worries me particularly is that instance politics questions become potentially more charged due to the fact that instances are hosting the communities[2] and not just the users, plus there’s not yet a way to migrate communities.
The fediverse is the best chance any of us have of experience an internet free of tech oligopolies, that’s the biggest difference for me.
Of course mass adoption would make it more likely to have lively niche communities, but most importantly, I think it should be a right for people to exist on the internet without a massive corporation trying to turn them into a nutjob for monetary gain.Because, like it or not, what normies do on social media matters. I, for one, don’t want fuckwads like Zuckerberg, Musk and Spez to continue to be able to skew the conversation in the proverbial town square e.g. during the 2024 election.
Centralized, corporate-controlled social media is literally a threat to democracy.
With Lemmy and an open source app on an open source platform you’re owning the means of production. We don’t need mass adoption, just enough users with a higher level of engagement. We’re now there, or close.
@vera Honestly I was on reddit for the nerds (people) not the company and that’s why I’m here now. Fortunately(?) I remember the internet before big social media and very comfortable with forums and boards. Can’t say I’m able to speak for anyone else though.
I would definitely be down with a return to things like webrings. Everyone creates their own website and uploads content, and good creators invite eachother to their rings. I don’t know why we ever stopped doing that.
But is that not what the fediverse is at heart? Anyone can make their own instance?
