I’ve been using fediverse stuff (Mastodon and, most recently, Calckey—I’m just going to use “Mastodon” as shorthand here; purists can bite me) for over a year now and have been doing so full time for about six months, following Elon Musk buying Twitter (since on principle, I decline to give Elon Musk money or attention). This latter part coincided with the “November 2022 influx,” when lots of new people joined Mastodon for similar reasons. A lot of that influx has not stuck around. Everyone is very aware at this point that active user numbers of Mastodon have dropped off a cliff…
What do you think about this article? Have you perceived anything similar?
That’s a very interesting and useful read, albeit also really long, but worth it. I think that the mindset of people coming from Reddit (myself included) is different than the people from Twitter. Reddit itself is a weird paradoxical “huge niche” of people who tend to be less conforming and slightly more educated on tech. However, it is true that the Fedi community should make some compromises to really be welcoming and support newcomers, and the tecnical side should change to make it more viable in the aspects that this post outlined. Perhaps some under the hood optimizations and centralization compromises where smaller instances can depend on bigger ones like a tree instead of connecting to every single other instance.
My point is, the Fediverse will probably never be mainstream, but has a shot at being “big enough”. However this shot depends significantly on the people running it and the community at large making compromises at least as big as the ones newcomers make when joining to find a middle ground, which may not happen.