this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Fediverse
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This magazine is dedicated to discussions on the federated social networking ecosystem, which includes decentralized and open-source social media platforms. Whether you are a user, developer, or simply interested in the concept of decentralized social media, this is the place for you. Here you can share your knowledge, ask questions, and engage in discussions on topics such as the benefits and challenges of decentralized social media, new and existing federated platforms, and more. From the latest developments and trends to ethical considerations and the future of federated social media, this category covers a wide range of topics related to the Fediverse.
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I'm not sure it failed.
I joined Mastodon in Apr 03, 2017 - but was never really very active because - well, there wasn't really much to be active with. It was ghost town. But it grew slowly and organically. Which was OK.
Then the big Twitter meltdown happened in Nov 22 and all of a sudden we got couple of million new users. There was a lot of adjustment, from new people and the old inhabitants. It wasn't very pretty (the whole CW debacle).
Many of those millions left and (presumably) went back to Twitter. But many stayed. The twitter InfoSec community is (mostly) on Mastodon now. Quite a lot of science-twitter is as well. We're far bigger place now than we were before 22.
Twitter didn't crash and burn (yet). People went back. But I don't think the migration failed. Some stayed and we're richer place for it.
But I agree with lot of the things in the post. Dealing with federation, quirky UI's, prototype services (hi kbin!) and other linuxesque peculiarities isn't what mainstream is looking for. The whole "just spin up your own fedi-server" might not be very sustainable/environmentally friendly compared to centralized well maintained datacenter. There are lot of problems to solve before fediverse is "mainstream ready".
But to be quite honest. I'm not sure it needs to be. Yes, I get that it's hard to "build following" without mainstream, but to be honest, I actually prefer more signal and less noise. And lot of the "mainstream" is just noise who follow popular accounts because they're popular.
Indeed - I think people seem to have this ill-conceived notion that Twitter has to fail for Mastodon to succeed.
From my perspective, both are doing just fine. Mastodon has developed a community with, in my opinion, much higher quality discussion, and well, Twitter can keep being twitter.
That said, what I do think helps here is that Kbin has a much lower barrier to entry. I find it much easier to sign up on here than trying to determine which Mastodon instance to use and I think that helps tremendously.
The thing that's interesting to me is this:
Kbin is technically federated and Kbin.social is technically just an instance on a federated network, the federation is just broken right now. But the simple fact of that not being a consideration, and everyone signing up on Kbin.social, has led to comments like this where "it's so much easier".
It rather proves my point; putting decentralised whatever front and centre makes things pointlessly complex and offputting to end users. They don't want to think about this shit, they just want to read stuff and post. The less they have to think about this shit, and/or the less this shit has an impact on their experience, the better for them.