Fediverse

I think it depends on the definition of taking off. I see the Fediverse as a huge success with millions of people using it every day. At this point it's proven itself to be both viable and sustainable. I only see it growing going forward.

The Fediverse hasn't gone mainstream, but I think that's a different discussion. Fediverse primarily attracts people who are dissatisfied with the status quo for one reason or another. The existing mainstream platforms obviously work well enough, so there is no reason to expect average users to start migrating from them.

I think it has taken off. I know more real life peoples on mastodon that I did a year ago. It's like a nice little opt-out of surveillance capitalism.

As far as I'm concerned it has taken off. I come on sites like this and there are all these active users, so people are definitely using them. The reason why other platforms are still more popular is just the network effect. People want to be on platforms where "everyone" is, and sometimes they don't even want to be on them but have to be. Just imagine what percentage of Facebook's user base were compelled to use it while otherwise having not interest in such things?

It's the same story with the Internet and e-mail. Most people avoided them to years until they couldn't avoid them anymore. Lemmy et al. are nice because the people who are here actually want to be.

All the fediverse social networks are just federated alternatives to already existing social networks + federation. This means that the bulk of people won't adopt them unless they care about federation with a small community over the non-federated network.

Federated solutions won't rival major social networks unless they are innovating the next features and solutions instead of making alternatives to already existing and dominant networks.

Besides the first mover advantage, I'd say the biggest thing is lack of good mobile apps. Most people do social media on their phones nowadays, whereas the biggest sites got popular in a time before that was needed.

I'm not a huge fan of the twitter style of social media, but I might use mastodon or pleroma more if the apps were a bit better. Lemmy also has this problem cause we have no apps released yet, although a few like lemmur are in the works.

Radical right-wing people think it's a cesspool of leftists and flock to platforms like Gab (which is Nazi twitter).

Many other people just don't know what the fediverse is.

It's also too complicated. People are not using protocols (what ActivityPub/Fediverse is) but platforms. They don't use "federated lemmy", they use Twitter, Facebook and other centralised platforms. It's way too complicated to understand what federation is.

So my personal impressions is that mainstream services are garbage, but that mirrors the mainstream culture that consumes them. If most people want to stay on Instagram or Facebook, I would prefer they do, because as we saw when they did the Instagram Boycott on the 20th, we got a lot of new users, but it brought a lot of toxicity over from Instagram and once again somebody who really wasn't a bad person at all got bullied off the platform by a small, but loud group of people. I came over here to escape the toxicity of the big social media platforms and found something resembling leftist solidarity. I appreciate that most of these services don't tolerate bigotry to nearly the same extent as the mainstream services, that I would say often amplify hateful things because controversial content gets prioritized by the algorithms. The reason I like the fediverse is quality, not quantity. Mainstreaming these services would require either conforming to the norms of the mainstream internet culture, or somehow getting the mainstream internet culture to conform to our norms here. Both of these tasks seem pointless. Maybe the goal shouldn't be total market saturation, but sustainability of the communities we have come to love. I think we get a lot of user share, but more than that we get a lot of really great, friendly and welcoming people for the most part. I think the toxic voices tend to get drowned out over time, because we have tools to filter that out and while we may have shitty things that happen from time to time as will any community, a lot of our instances function as a community and really do feel like a home on the internet.

The inertia of using the 'mainstream' platforms will be one of the hardest things to overcome.. If all your friends and family are on platform X, and they're not coming to platform Y with you... well, it could be a rather boring experience... at least at first..

I think that the fediverse has already taken off. It's not mainstream -perhaps never will be-, but it reached a critical mass and that's crucial. The content network effect of the commercial social networks is very strong, but don't forget it also carries drawbacks. Something similar happens with cities: many people want to life there (services, jobs, cultural offer...) but doing so also leads to problems (road traffic congestion, air quality and many more!).

Fediverse has proven it's viable, is getting more mature and it's gaining impulse on many different niches. I think these are all good signs. 'Cities' are going to exist for a long time (the capital's machine is very strong), 'towns' need to keep working and fitting the needs of the burned migrants (respecting privacy, respecting languages, avoiding harassment...) without repeating the 'cities' errors: monetization of free giant services --> tons of adds, massive profilation, lack of privacy, development of addiction thought algorithms...

Let's see how much the fediverse can grow (technological sovereignty of grass roots, governments...) and where is the equilibrium with the big commercial social networks. I'm sure we are in the beginning of a long and interesting transformation :-)

I think one of the issues is the tech angle. Everybody uses the federation aspect as a selling point, but:

• most people don't care about that
• it doesn't work seamlessly in practice

If it worked seamlessly, I think the benefits would be obvious, even to those people who don't care. But you still need a separate account on every one of these platforms to interact fully.

Some of the things that don't work seamlessly:

• The microblogs (pleroma, mastodon, etc) don't show lemmy posts and can't comment on them (I know this is possible and on the roadmap, but it doesn't work now so new users don't care); see how the blog platforms (write.as, plume) allow following and commenting from a microblog account
• A microblog acct can follow a pixelfed acct, but as far as I can tell, there's no way to discover those accts. Pixelfed doesn't allow viewing posts from its web interface without signing in. (I'm also not sure of the point of Pixelfed, since it's just a microblog can only post photos. It seems like it was made to just be an Instagram clone. In my mind, it could have just been a client for the existing microblogging servers)
• When a new project is started, they try to federate with mastodon first. So everything is oriented around mastodon and its quirks. (WebFinger is required, their signatures are apparently out of date, etc). Some projects just don't work with pleroma and others.

To sum up, every fediverse project is basically a clone of an existing big name company, but doesn't do anything better. And since they're all small, open source projects, they have less resources and develop features slower. There's also the culture/personality issue, but that's also a huge topic and this post is long enough

you're seeing it in the niche communities that you'd expect to be on the cutting edge: tech workers, sex workers, furries... I think in the small intentional ecofocused communities you see a lot of the core constructive energy that you could possibly hope for. To bring down the bigger silos, a more parasitic approach is going to be called for; I am very curious to see how that will develop.

Big is not always good ;)

• There are no platforms/client/protocols for meaningful discussions, like NNTP/usenet was, only twitter/reddit/instagram clones. The fediverse often tries to compete with FAANGs on their own turf instead of choosing new paradigms.
• Interesting content is key. Most platforms don't have any effective and user-centered search/filter algorithm.
• Architecture issues: users have to trust random strangers to run a server reliably and securely (or fall for yet another blockchain)

To top if off, I think Fediverse related sites are too happy with the technical aspect for most regular social media users. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing. Just puts off people who would already might think getting onto regular social media is too much work.

When I first looked at Mastodon I noped out because they had a bunch of things to choose from and made it seem hard to use with the email style links at the end.

Lack of apps and lack of need for most people. I think instances that fill a niche and provide a service that is better than the non federated service will help.

In terms of social media, it comes down to content. I know every time I've joined something was because there was enough content that I wanted to look at for me to do daily. Right now, lots of fediverse stuff is about FOSS and tech, which a vast majority of people don't care too much about. But it is slowly starting to spread, nd facilitating those groups by contributing and allowing to grow will do wonders.

I'd also say if you have friends somewhere, you follow them there. I know that was me for all my mainstream social media joining (other than tumblr, that I got my friends to join and I joined because of the content I found).

But seriously, like the others have said, it's really taking off and you know its true by how many alternatives there are! Almost every mainstream social network has a fedialt, which, if it wasn't as popular, wouldn't exist yet!

Maybe it boils down to economics. It’s expensive to use the fediverse in terms of time and energy spent finding and creating content (vs say retweeting influencers), interesting users, etc and if users do not value privacy and freedom from corporate control, switching is not worth it. So long as mainstream platforms are perceived as free it will be hard to disrupt.

But the dopamine/serotonin addiction effect you referenced is pretty compelling too.

as been around for a while now.

??? It's been a month or two, if we're talking about federated Lemmy.

This stuff takes time. For something like facebook or reddit, they had to be in just the right set of circumstances to capitalize on people's interest, and they gradually grew for more than a decade, eventually reaching something that at least seems like expononential growth in the past five years. The reach and visibility that those things have built and currently enjoy is orders of magnitude beyond anything the fediverse has.

That said, it is being used, especially on Mastodon. And Lemmy is being used. I don't think it's a fair or reasonable metric to expect something to be as big as Facebook, one of the largest companies in the world, over a short timeline and to say it's not a success if it's not at that scale.

Lack of influencers/celebrities on the fediverse is why it's adoption is low. Someone important would have to make a conscious choice to only use Mastodon/Lemmy/PixelFed, etc. instead of Reddit, Twitter, Instagram. There would be the other challenge that if someone did do that, someone might create a bot to repost their tweets, or set up an instagram account to repost their photos, etc. With the inertia that exists it will be a slow process. I think Lemmy and Mastodon have a good shot just by the communities they are building.

But then you have things like that Star Trek celebrity trying to use Mastodon and being bullied out of the software because of a militant trans community. That could also be problematic for adoption if there are social barriers being put up to entry.

The dominant theory seems to be ease of use/simplicity and the front page of everything having furries, hentai and a bunch of nerd chat.

I think a good way to solve a few of the issues is to have the main instance of each platform market themselves a little harder and not so much on the pods/instances - teach that to the people later after they get in to the atmosphere of the Fediverse. For example, someone goes to Mastodon.social, all they see is that it's the main instance, and other that the word instance, it looks like a simple Twitter alternative.

Then later if they want to delve a little deeper (the customer), they can learn about instances/pods. From there they can host their own, or search for a new one. (Most of the instance directories could use some simplifying too)

Then to go along with that, each main instance would also have to be moderated quite heavily to keep things clean for when people first join.

Thoughts?