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Is the Fediverse stalling?
(lemmy.relayeasy.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
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Network effects are incredibly strong. Xitter is now a disinformation and fascist hellhole, and yet people who should know better still refuse to leave. We have the advantage that we're not growth focused, so we can can bide our time. The inevitable enshittification will do its job eventually, but there's no telling when the tipping point will happen.
Yet, Bluesky has grown to 35M+ active accounts, even though they started way after us
This is not an "advantage". This is an excuse we tell ourselves to cope with our failures.
And when it does, the majority of people will go the next shiny "free as in beer", VC-funded siloed platform and we are going to be just another "They don't know" meme.
Not gonna argue with you mate, I know we disagree fundamentally on what the fediverse means. Me and most others never will see eye to eye with you with your capitalist growth-focused approach.
The "most others" here is a heavily self-selected group of people who don't want to compromise on any of their values and treat any effort to grow as a threat.
All of this to say, it's fine if you say "Yes, we are small and I want it that way because if it gets any bigger we will be surrounded by people who do not uphold the same values we do". The problem is that you're arguing "We are only small because of $random_reason (network effects/evil capitalists/not enough funding/etc)", as if "being small" was determined by external factors and not something that you can control.
That's the point of disagreement. I think we can control this and we can bring more people here, but it's just that you don't want to do it if means sacrificing your ideology.
Of course I don't want to compromise my values in order to see growth of a platform that I use precisely because it aligns with my values.
When I say "compromise", I am not saying "sacrifice them completely". I am talking about in terms of Big Fedi vs Small Fedi, regardless on where on the scale you want to stay, there are trade-offs to be made.
When do you think Bluesky started? It was already a known place by many before the 2024 US election, and was founded by the ex-Twitter co-founder. The people behind it were several orders of magnitude more well known.
It was announced in 2019 as an internal Twitter project, but it became its own thing in 2021-ish. Then they spent two years reinventing a bunch of things so that they could keep Twitter's original view - i.e, a system where they could delegate all the boring/liability heavy parts to users (identity, UGC) while keeping them in control of rent-seeking toll gates (the AppView).
It takes more than money and a good contact network to build something that can attract people. Jack nowadays is pushing for Nostr, but as a product it is a lot less appealing to the masses compared to Bluesky.
I mean Bluesky had 1 million registered users in September 2023, and 3 million in February 2024. It clearly had a higher base level footprint than Lemmy has ever had.
But why are you comparing Bluesky's numbers with Lemmy's. A more apt comparison would be against the whole Fediverse. We had ~2 million people in early 2023, and we've gone down since then.
You initially made the Bluesky comparison. And to be clear, by "Lemmy" I did mean the wider Fediverse.
In any case, Bluesky itself is also flatlining and declining anyway.
Yeah, but my point is that they were a lot more effective in capturing mindshare when it was needed, and they didn't see growth as compromise on their values like people do here.
When the next fuckup from Big Tech comes around, do you think that people will think about going to Mastodon/Lemmy/PieFed, or they will just look at Bluesky?
The Bluesky surge happened after a massive global election result and a massive grievance from progressives/leftists over Musk and how Twitter has become. Indeed, if you think lemmy is politically partisan - then Bluesky is no different.
The Reddit -> Lemmy surge happened because of some poor Reddit admin decisions. The scale of the events were on different levels.
It would depend on the site origin of the fuckup. If Reddit fucks up, as a reaction - Lemmy would get many new users.
Why didn't they go to Mastodon? (hint: some of them did in 2022)
Or perhaps there will be some other platform that is not so afraid of growth like Lemmy is, and people will go there, just like people went to Bluesky instead of going to Mastodon?
No idea.
Yeah, there might be. But it'd have to be pretty similar to Reddit. I don't know of any right now.
I don't know how you think the fediverse is somehow afraid of growth though.
As explained by the user below
Communities growing in size is for capitalist pig dogs!
We here at the communist-iverse prefer to die slowly with brief spurts of new users when a more popular platform makes changes before they leave again
Tbf Idk what you imagine Lemmy can somehow do to entice new people
ngl same :|
For me Mastodon and Lemmy have shown that the general population have absolutely zero interest in decentalisation, they just don't care
Like a hive mind they simply go where other people are, if there are two crowds of people, one with 5 people and the other with 50, they will go to the one with 50, regardless if the 50 users are mingling with people like Musk and they hate Musk and don't want to support him in any way
Just posting that made me think, if people simply go to where people are, having lots of small servers instead of one large one is actually a turn off for most people
Better UX I think would help slightly, not easy when we have such good decentralization. Maybe PieFed will end up hooking people better?