With the rise of the Fediverse driven by Elon Musk’s continued efforts to make Twitter unpleasant for the majority of people, it has been interesting and exciting to see increased interest in forms of Social Media outside the corporate hegemony dominated by Twitter and Facebook over the last decade.

Truthfully, for a lot of us who had been on Twitter pre-2012 or so, Mastadon, with it’s user-curated stream of content, feels more like a return to something that was lost instead of something new. There is an excitement about Mastadon, it’s underlying protocol ActivityPub, and the collection of inter-operable apps and servers that make up what we’re now calling the Fediverse.

And I’m glad for it.

  • DessalinesA
    10·
    2 years ago

    This was a really good article, thank you for sharing / writing it.

    ActivityPub and Mastadon do have some pretty strong architectural benefits, but the challenges we face in making the Web federated again is, as it always has been, social, not technical.

    One of the things that was a bit of a dirty secret outside of Silicon Valley for a long time was that the organic growth that various platforms touted, largely wasn’t. Teams of people would pay media personalities and businesses to use their platforms in order to get it into the public eye.

    This to me is the main issue the fediverse faces. The issue remains adoption. Even the UI’s of mastodon and some other fediverse services have surpassed the big tech offerings in speed, usability, and easiness to use.

    But no matter how many more features we offer, the fediverse could stay at a stagnant <1% of total social media users, unless it tackles the problem of effective adoption and onboarding.

    It’s also complicated by factors mentioned in the article, having to do with incentive structures. Most open source projects stand against the “viral growth” model that tries to grow its userbase at all costs, where each new user is seen as a potential income stream. For people running servers, new users mean more work, for no gain. As the writer mentioned, these social media startups employed teams of people dedicated solely to the task of growing their userbase, getting media attention, and spreading awareness. Open source projects rarely have the resources to do that labor.

    • PicoBlaanket
      6·
      2 years ago

      That’s true, and that’s why I like this place: it isn’t built on greed.

      Yes - lemmy is faster, and the UI is cleaner - yet the hidden advantage is what lemmy avoids:

      1. no nsfw. 22% of reddit is NSFW1. You do a search for “hope” and every fourth result is someone’s naked ass.

      2. no karma-farmers… reddit and twitter are excellent honeypots - I hope they stay there!

      3. no corporate interest. People are becoming more aware of corporate spying/greed, and will increasingly seek places like this.

      It’s far better to attract good people than to attract the most people!

      Excellence and quality are created by what you provide, but also by what you avoid!

      That’s why this place is great.

      [I’m sure you’ve pondered all this already - just expressing gratitude]

    • AJ Sadauskas@aus.social
      3·
      2 years ago

      @dessalines @lemmyreader For people following along on Mastodon, here’s the link to the article: https://blog.foxxtrot.net/2023/03/federation-isnt-inevitable.html

      From the OP: "With the rise of the Fediverse driven by Elon Musk’s continued efforts to make Twitter unpleasant for the majority of people, it has been interesting and exciting to see increased interest in forms of Social Media outside the corporate hegemony dominated by Twitter and Facebook over the last decade.

      "Truthfully, for a lot of us who had been on Twitter pre-2012 or so, Mastadon, with it’s user-curated stream of content, feels more like a return to something that was lost instead of something new. There is an excitement about Mastadon, it’s underlying protocol ActivityPub, and the collection of inter-operable apps and servers that make up what we’re now calling the Fediverse.

      “And I’m glad for it.”

      #Mastodon #Fediverse #Facebook #Twitter #ElonMusk #Elon #TwitterMigration #ActivityPub