I feel that it is time to have an honest discussion on the state of the fediverse.
Mastodon was founded a decade ago, and since then has roughly 1 million monthly active users. That is 0.25% of the MAU of twitter/X currently (which has itself seen declines over the years).
Pixelfed has 250k monthly active users, which is 0.008% of Instagrams 3 billion MAU.
Friendica has 5000 MAU which is essentially 0% of the 3.1 billion MAU that Facebook has.
Overall, even if you combine every fediverse platform together, and count bluesky as a part of the fediverse as well, it’s still less than 1% of the MAU of X.
Which is all to say, alternatives to corporate owned platforms does not exist at this point in time, on a statistical basis. Not in any meaningful way.
So why is this do we think? Why does the most popular social media site in the world not even have a decent competitor out there, when we have the technology to build one? It’s certainly not from a lack of user interest. Search terms like “facebook alternatives” have absolutely skyrocketed to unprecedented levels in the last couple years, as the realities of corporate oligarchy have become to hard for the average person to ignore. Governments and organizations around the world have started discussing the alternatives to American owned tech companies. And yet, growth of the fediverse platforms is essentially flat. People try a platform, and then quickly bounce off, either returning to old platforms or quitting social media all together.
That second one is not a problem in my mind, but let’s dive a bit deeper into the first point. Why do people not tend to stick around on the fediverse? Here are some potential root causes I can think of:
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The choices are overwhelming. There are dozens of fediverse platforms that provide every function under the sun. Even within a single platform, users are asked to pick a server, which is an instant friction point for users.
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Functionality on the fediverse is subpar compared to larger platforms, and the functionalities that do exist are disjointed between multiple platforms. We have events, but no standard event functionality integrated into mastodon. What does exist is a hack/workaround, rather than an actual implementation. Pixelfed does not have stories. There is a marketplace website for the fediverse (Flohmarkt), but no marketplace integration for friendica. Etc, etc.
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Users are afraid of losing their history and friends on other platforms. Every social media platform is required by law to provide a GDPR export of a users social media data, but no platform that I am aware of is using this to integrate a users post history or subscriptions to rebuild users social graph and profile on the fediverse. There are technical hurdles there for sure, but there are a lot of opportunities being left on the table.
So those are, imo, the biggest stumbling blocks to the growth of users on the fediverse, and why 99% of users bounce off when they try it. I am building some solutions to these problems myself, but I’m curious to hear what others think about this, and the honest state of the fediverse. Any issues I overlooked? Should we care about user growth at all? What do we think?
ActivityPub has been around for 8 years, and IMO, the Fediverse is not evolving. It is not federating the way ActivityPub was designed for.
I want Mastodon threads in Lemmy. I want PeerTube subscriptions in Lemmy. I want to subscribe to Pixelfed users in Lemmy. I want all of these different ActivityPub communities to talk to each other.
I want to go to my front page and have it be the ultimate front page for me. Why should I be forced to use different pieces of software that pretend to communicate with the same protocol?! Lemmy is supposed to be a news aggregator, so fucking aggregate!
You can get some of those interop in Mbin and piefed. Lemmy just takes a while to develop. You can already see Mastodon threads in Mbin. But I see your point, the overall protocol implementation is ALL over the place. Its very hard to keep up with what supports what.
It is evolving when you get on the beading edge. Its usually the even smaller stuff like snac2/piefed/mbin/gotosocial etc… its all over the place.
Honestly what I want is the ability for mastodon to act like an RSS feed instead of one big wall. Have each individual as a separate feed. Because my current gotosocial/mastodon is flooded with people that post 30+ times a day somehow drowning out people that post 1/2 times a blue moon. Im working on something that may do the job in the future, but the code is VERY raw so it may never see release.
They may or may not be the case, but nobody is even trying. Support the base protocol for other platforms and make specific hacks for each one to fix differences. I would at the very least expect read-only support, with some banner that says “this post is from platform X and comments are currently not supported”.
I keep hearing excuses like “PeerTube can’t link with Lemmy, because then it would have to download the video files”, instead of just implementing the obvious solution of NOT downloading the video files and let the parent platform handle it. There’s too many purists that try to implement the perfect solution and say it’s impossible because it doesn’t handle the edge cases.
Even Reddit from years ago spent a lot of effort making sure thumbnails were extracted from many many different platforms, whenever you submitted a post. It didn’t matter that there were a lot of different video or news platforms. It worked for almost all of the cases, and if it didn’t, it got fixed pretty fast. No shared protocol for that, just hardcoded lists of domains and URLs.
Fair! I will say that some platforms are better than others in this regard. For example, I was able to see this post on mastodon and reply to comments, but those comments do not show up on piefed. Not sure where they do show up, but I have had conversations from mastodon to users on Lemmy. So yea, it’s pretty disjointed and disorganized, and not living up to the full potential of what activitypub was designed to do.