I’m genuinely interested in people thoughts about the Fediverse because here in the UK it has massively stalled in 2025, like a lot of things. I am seeing way less posts from UK people and way less interaction and general use in fact. Most seem to have stopped social media use to be fair, and I know a lot of that is to do with my age (old fart here, 56 laps round sun and counting) but the numbers game look poor from my point of view. Do we think the Fediverse has a future now after useage appears to be going downwards? Is it a UK thing? (well I know the UK is weird but hey)
Isn’t it a little bit sad to think that the best we can do here is to wait for everyone else to get pissed at Big Tech’s fuckups?
I mean everyone already has platforms they’re largely comfortable with and fediverse platforms are less accessible, smaller, and usually clones of existing formats. The primary place we compete is on not being total dogshit, so when people can forget that their comfortable platforms are dogshit, it doesn’t surprise me that people wouldn’t be going out of their way to venture out into a new unfamiliar thing, with a different culture and much smaller userbase 🤷♂️
I’m happy to be here regardless of whether we’re growing personally. In spite of Lemmy’s challenges I enjoy it here, and that’s enough for me.
I honestly think self-righteousness pushes people away. It’s why I can barely stand bluesky. During the big exodus from reddit, all these so-called far-lefties (who I think were just reddit goons doing infiltration) were all screaming for everybody to defederate. Even now, I keep arguing against idiots posting “kill a cop” or “kill fascists” memes, like this is literally an “advocate violence” platform. I don’t expect to pull big numbers with that kind of shit.
Yeah we do have a lot of people who feel it’s more important to demonstrate their anger than to figure out what people could do to improve the problems.
Worse still, a lot of people seem to have convinced themselves that whatever makes it most clear they’re angry and hurts the people they disagree with the most is actually what’s most productive. The anger about the state of things, particularly in the US is entirely valid. The self-justification of behaviours that burn bridges and radicalize more people is not.
If you want to implement any kind of solution you do, necessarily have to have a critical mass of people who agree with you, and you cannot build that by antagonizing anyone who doesn’t already share your exact flavour of left wing ideology, and acting in a way that reflects poorly on your ideology to everyone except people who already agree with you
Very rarely is anyone willing to confront that violence as a means to an end, pragmatically, has enormous costs, and that employing it just because you’re (justifiably) angry, is almost always detrimental to the exact abouts you’re mad about
(Sorry, I know I kinda went off track from exactly what you were talking about, this is just a closely related huge frustration of mine)
Enshittification often serves as a driver towards that behavior. However, while this platform has attempted to leave the former behind, it is not always so simple to actually accomplish that lofty goal. i.e. even if the ultimate disease is now cured, the symptoms themselves still persist, feeding forward by influencing others to continue with those old, bad habits.
Yeah, I guess social media has, in effort to build maximum engagement, really shaped a lot of people’s way of engaging with others in deeply toxic ways that will be very hard to untangle and change, now that the social forces that teach us how to act towards one another have been hijacked for monetary gain, and people have spent so much time exposed to that :(
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, it gave me some new things to think about, and maybe it will help me set aside my frustration and remember my empathy when dealing with those people, at least more often. Because if I want to enact change I also need to build a critical mass of people who share my perspective.
Sorry for the ludicrous run-on sentence that is the first paragraph lol, I’m to tired to edit more at the moment 😅
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.
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?
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