this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2023
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Fediverse
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A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.
Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
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Growth is not the only, nor even main, metric to measure success of fedi. Fedi is not a VC-funded startup that needs to grow exponentially to remain viable (consider how that worked for Twitter and Reddit…).
Building a resilient, safe, longterm-viable communities is the metric to measure fedi by. That takes more time, than hooking people on endorphin/noradrenalin high and slick interfaces.
This is false. I follow a couple of thousand people and have an interesting, diverse, funny, and informative timeline. Very few accounts I follow crosspost.
There is no recommendation algorithm so your timeline is what you make of it. It takes a bit more time to curate, but you end up with your own thing that suits you — if you put in the tiny bit of effort required.
100% agree, especially on the resiliency part.
A community with 100 users but will never die is much better than one with a million users but might kick the bucket anytime.
The way the Fediverse works, and assuming that not everyone goes to the same instance, then it will be pretty much guaranteed to exist as long as there are users. And this is huge in terms of community building.
Obviously there are also threats, but they are different threats than those that apply to centralized platforms. One of the threats, in fact, is centralization itself — if people flock to a few gigantic instances, that creates a central point of failure, potentially.
But there are currently ~20k independently run fedi instances. Some had been running for a decade or longer.
As I said, we're here for the long run.
I am very well aware about the lack of algoritm and how Mastodon works. But the issue is not for me, I like Mastodon! And I don't like Twitter at all. But it is for Average Joe, who needs to come over in order to replace the place of Big Tech SNSs.
If the Fediverse just wants to exist stabely, even be mentionable in size, it is not. But to take over from the Big Tech SNSs, it is. People are where other people are. And that's what the topic was about, replacing Big Tech SNSs.
For me, it's enough. But for Average Joe, who wants to commend on their favourite influencers and use it to talk to custoner support of delivery coyriers and stores they buy from, it is not. In fact, customer support is the only reason I have a Twitter account.