Growth is (generally) fine, as long as it’s decentralized and/or by trustworthy partners. I’m already uneasy about how big lemmy.world is comparatively, even though I’ve never seen anything to suggest any bad intent. Meta would be neither.
If we could keep Meta’s volume to a level where they cannot exert undue influence, I’d even be OK with them being part of it.
Coercion seems to be a big part of the enshittification process these days. Even once you complete stage 3 and piss everyone off, forcing them to stay against their will is part of the game.
This would force a lot of unwilling people to deal with Facebook, and long-term.
Twitter’s weak, not worth buying,
Everything has its price. But just like Musk overpaid for Twitter in the first place, he surely thinks it’s more valuable than anyone else in the market does.
I’m also sure that he values it at a price point that’s higher than it will cost Facebook to create a competitor.
That’s not how people work. If they start from Threads, very few will switch to a 3rd party client. And defederation will happen anyway once Meta gets control, it’s the whole point of EEE.
You do have a point though- Threads could be a threat to Mastodon even completely isolated. A lot of current Mastodon growth isn’t because of its draw as a product/platform; it’s simply people people leaving Twitter for something else. Threads will also be a something else, creating meaningful competition
I suppose that depends on what you consider “good” for Mastodon. I wouldn’t consider growth simply for the sake of growth to be a good thing. That’s stage 1 of enshittification. It also means a shitload of awful people joining, tons of mod work, etc.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for Mastodon and the fediverse becoming more accessible. I just think the growth needs to be for the right reasons.
Harder to find current and useful numbers than I expected.
According to https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount,
13,213,947 accounts
According to https://me.pcmag.com/en/social-media-1/17992/mastodon-sees-another-surge-in-active-users-following-twitters-rate-limiting,
2,055,502 active users monthly (3,797,695 active users half-year)
Are you applying for a job at Meta? Is that your essay on why they should hire you?
Keep in mind that right now, all of the big names posting are paid content. It’s probably not labeled as such, but they’re all on Meta’s payroll to make the platform attractive to new users. Will it take off? It actually has a decent chance. Not because of anything that they’re doing, but because of exactly how badly Twitter is fucking things up right now. People want out, and most couldn’t/wouldn’t/didn’t make the jump to Mastodon when everything with Musk started. This now looks like a viable alternative to them.
But no, I don’t want Facebook to destroy this beautiful new thing I just found.
You’ve completely missed the point. It’s not that Facebook (and by extension, their users) will connect to Mastodon, it’s that they will take over Mastodon, seizing all control for themselves, and coopting the existing userbase.
Right now it’s a separate product. Just like people know that Twitter is not Mastodon, Threads isn’t either. If you want to reach Twitter users, you get a Twitter account. If you want to reach Mastodon users, you get a Mastodon account. Facebook is planning to market themselves as the best way to enter the Mastodon ecosystem. Before long, they will be the absolute dominant server. Then they will have control, because defederation is a weapon they can wield and not vice-versa.
This is not theoretical, either. Google did the EXACT same thing back with Google Talk and the XMPP protocol. And we know how Facebook operates, so we know that this will eventually happen. The only way to stop it is before it starts - Facebook users need to be unhappy (at Facebook) that they can’t reach Mastodon users, so that defederation remains their own problem.
(Separately, I agree with you that Lemmy needs to become more accessible to the common user. But simply handing it all over to someone as awful as Zuck is not the way)
Use lemmyverse.net to find communities across all instances. It will make you search a lot easier, and show you when a community exists on multiple instances
Bots are not inherently evil. If they do something valuable for the community, and work as intended, they can be very helpful. While I’m not familiar with the details, that looks to be a product release post - which (depending on the community) can be very useful to automate.
The problem is that we have all been flooded with useless, low-quality shitpost bots. Reddit was full of them - like the one that would reply if your post was in alphabetical order. Naturally, we want to avoid/limit that as much as possible around here. But I’m also not as concerned - Lemmy doesn’t have the incentives that Reddit did, specifically there’s no karma.
On Lemmy, we just have to treat them the same as any other bad actor. We can block them individually, mods can ban them from that community, their instance can ban them, and our instance(s) can defederate with theirs. Due to the high demand for this feature, I expect we’ll be able to individually block instances in the near future.
This really needs to be higher.
Running a Mastodon or Lemmy server is surprisingly cheap. With some specific tweaks and rules (esp. hosting images and video elsewhere), it can get even cheaper.
If your only goal is to break even, then it’s amazingly easy. Roughly 1 of every 20 users contributing $1/month. Adjust the numbers as you see fit.
Or a single, non-datamined ad at the top of the page.