The only problem of excessive optimism is that you might end up alone in a hill which is not worth fighting for.
As a whole, ActivityPub servers have been losing users since its peak in 2022. We were given all the opportunity in the world to build on that momentum with the Reddit fiasco, but were absolutely afraid to grow. Until today, the discourse reeks of elitism with the “I don’t redditors here”.
Meanwhile, Bluesky has focused on building a product that can be used by the masses, without acting pretentious about who they wanted to be there. They were already getting a.sunstantial crowd from Mastodon, now they are taking the Brazilians we well.
The momentum is not in our favor, and our reactionary, anti-growth culture is not helping.
Fedi’s daily active users actually went up for the last two months after hitting a low of just under 1,000,000. That’s a lot of people, and on a platform that likely has the ability to carry on like a cockroach in a nuclear winter.
I’m mostly going to talk about Lemmy here as you mention the Reddit fiasco.
but were absolutely afraid to grow
We were not afraid to grow, the instances did not even exist when Reddit disabled the API. LW, lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works were all created around the time of the Reddit announcement.
Until today, the discourse reeks of elitism with the “I don’t redditors here”
For every “welcome” post, you can find 10 other comments that amount to “I left Reddit because their users are toxic/suck/stupid”.
I provided examples, you did not, but okay.
One of the biggest complaints about the Reddit mirrors is “if I wanted to see Reddit content, I’d go to Reddit”.
The biggest complaints about mirrors were that they were posted by bots which
do not filter content, so they repost the same karma farming posts than the ones from Reddit
never answer back (obviously), which makes no sense for communities where people are sharing experiences
Go check the posts about Fediverser, see how many people are opposed to it on the grounds of “I don’t want to bring more people here”.
I had a look at the most recent one, most of its discussion derailed about the correct usage of downvotes: https://lemmy.world/post/18249058
I had a look at another one (https://aussie.zone/post/12244073 ), it just seemed like the admins didn’t want to have to manage additional software. They are still struggling with federation (https://aussie.zone/post/13429731 ), so that’s probably on their priority
Older posts from a year ago aren’t probably reflective on how people feel about the topic today, a lot of the people left and joined in the meantime
So now you understand why it matters to value the work of developers?
I never denied that having massive financial investment would improve software.
What I said is that it is unrealistic to expect the Lemmy userbase to raise the same amount than investors looking for the next Twitter (and I stand by that point).
Thinking about it, it’s interesting that no other company tried to create a new Reddit, in the same way BlueSky did for Twitter. Probably because forums are less profitable than microblogging.
@rglullis@cabbage I feel like it’s only a matter of time until they have their own Elon Musk moment. Then their users will have to make some tough choices again.
@rglullis Nothing all that scientific. It’s just that Facebook was pretty cool in the beginning, before it was obvious how awful Zuck was. Tumblr was great! But then it was sold to Yahoo. Twitter was… fine but then it was sold to Elon. Feels like there’s a pattern here, and maybe the pattern is that rich, awful people really like owning social media platforms.
The only problem of excessive optimism is that you might end up alone in a hill which is not worth fighting for.
As a whole, ActivityPub servers have been losing users since its peak in 2022. We were given all the opportunity in the world to build on that momentum with the Reddit fiasco, but were absolutely afraid to grow. Until today, the discourse reeks of elitism with the “I don’t redditors here”.
Meanwhile, Bluesky has focused on building a product that can be used by the masses, without acting pretentious about who they wanted to be there. They were already getting a.sunstantial crowd from Mastodon, now they are taking the Brazilians we well.
The momentum is not in our favor, and our reactionary, anti-growth culture is not helping.
Fedi’s daily active users actually went up for the last two months after hitting a low of just under 1,000,000. That’s a lot of people, and on a platform that likely has the ability to carry on like a cockroach in a nuclear winter.
AFAIK, the increased users on fedidb are from Threads.
Threads doesn’t show up as an instance (https://fedidb.org/software/mastodon) nor as a software of its own
Yeah, it’s weird. It is showing on popular accounts, though.
Weird indeed
I’m mostly going to talk about Lemmy here as you mention the Reddit fiasco.
We were not afraid to grow, the instances did not even exist when Reddit disabled the API. LW, lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works were all created around the time of the Reddit announcement.
New joiners getting welcome by people on Lemmy
Which examples do you have of what you stated above?
BlueSky got 8 millions from investors, expecting Lemmy, Mbin or Piefed so have the same level of development is unrealistic: https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/05/bluesky-announces-its-8m-seed-round-first-paid-service-custom-domains/
For every “welcome” post, you can find 10 other comments that amount to “I left Reddit because their users are toxic/suck/stupid”.
One of the biggest complaints about the Reddit mirrors is “if I wanted to see Reddit content, I’d go to Reddit”.
Go check the posts about Fediverser, see how many people are opposed to it on the grounds of “I don’t want to bring more people here”.
So now you understand why it matters to value the work of developers?
I provided examples, you did not, but okay.
The biggest complaints about mirrors were that they were posted by bots which
I had a look at the most recent one, most of its discussion derailed about the correct usage of downvotes: https://lemmy.world/post/18249058
I had a look at another one (https://aussie.zone/post/12244073 ), it just seemed like the admins didn’t want to have to manage additional software. They are still struggling with federation (https://aussie.zone/post/13429731 ), so that’s probably on their priority
Older posts from a year ago aren’t probably reflective on how people feel about the topic today, a lot of the people left and joined in the meantime
I never denied that having massive financial investment would improve software.
What I said is that it is unrealistic to expect the Lemmy userbase to raise the same amount than investors looking for the next Twitter (and I stand by that point).
Thinking about it, it’s interesting that no other company tried to create a new Reddit, in the same way BlueSky did for Twitter. Probably because forums are less profitable than microblogging.
@rglullis @cabbage I feel like it’s only a matter of time until they have their own Elon Musk moment. Then their users will have to make some tough choices again.
What are you basing these feelings on?
@rglullis Nothing all that scientific. It’s just that Facebook was pretty cool in the beginning, before it was obvious how awful Zuck was. Tumblr was great! But then it was sold to Yahoo. Twitter was… fine but then it was sold to Elon. Feels like there’s a pattern here, and maybe the pattern is that rich, awful people really like owning social media platforms.