The fediverse is the best chance any of us have of experience an internet free of tech oligopolies, that’s the biggest difference for me.
Of course mass adoption would make it more likely to have lively niche communities, but most importantly, I think it should be a right for people to exist on the internet without a massive corporation trying to turn them into a nutjob for monetary gain.

A lot of community types just simply don’t work without a minimum critical mass of members.

Imagine asking a programming question on a software development community of just 5 people. You end up with 3 people who aren’t active enough to see the question, 1 person sees but doesn’t have an answer and doesn’t respond (classic lurker), and one person sees it and responds that they don’t know the answer. Now imagine a community of 5 thousand people…it’s suddenly much more feasible to even bother asking the question.

Sure, fediverse could exist with just 5 people, but it would be worthless and pointless.

Because if this place really did have only 5 users, it would be boring and pointless.

There are many different visions for “success” of decentralized projects, some of which require/imply explosive growth and some do not. There are also some goals, such as diversity and inclusivity, which can have complicated relationships with the concept of “growth.”

I want all kinds of people (that are NOT BIGOTS) to be join the fediverse, participate safely and form their own communities^[1].

To achieve this, it’s beneficial for it to be easy for folks to join the fediverse at all, e.g., being able to easily find an instance and sign up for an account and not worry about the infrastructure or instance politics, and critically to be able to easily find one another and interact. These are also features that just fuel userbase growth generally.

But to sustain it, it’s necessary to have strong moderation (which in turn requires a manageable workload for mods) and to keep large pools of bad actors in check. It’s also important on a safety basis for many users to be less discoverable because high discoverability of marginalized users results in high rates of harassment by bigots. These are features that support a better and safer experience for people who are in the fediverse.

These things are directly in tension, which makes it very difficult to have a healthy fediverse. The result on Mastodon has been a bifurcation of “successful” (by different definitions) instances into, on the one hand, very large but poorly moderated instances with garbage fire local timelines but lots of people and lots of content to interact with, and, on the other hand, smaller, well moderated instances that flourish internally but can be hard to join or to interact with if you’re on one of the large instances.

Both models exert exclusionary forces in their own ways. If you keep everyone in your federation, and that includes nazis, then you are de facto participating in driving people who are targeted by nazis off of the network. But if your happy little closed instances are impossible to join and has a constraining monoculture, then a lot of other nice folks may get left out.

There’s not an easy solution to this. The situation for lemmy will be similar in some ways and different in others. The piece that worries me particularly is that instance politics questions become potentially more charged due to the fact that instances are hosting the communities^[2] and not just the users, plus there’s not yet a way to migrate communities.

Because fuck tech CEOs that’s why.

Because, like it or not, what normies do on social media matters. I, for one, don’t want fuckwads like Zuckerberg, Musk and Spez to continue to be able to skew the conversation in the proverbial town square e.g. during the 2024 election.

Centralized, corporate-controlled social media is literally a threat to democracy.

The amount of knowledge within the community and the representation of niche subcommunities grows with amount of users. So within huge communities you can be assured you have an expert for nicht topic x somewhere. And even your most outlandish interest is followed by at least a few others. That is what I joined larger social media for at least.

I think it might be a bit of an xy problem. I myself have hoped for the runaway success of the fediverse. But I realized it’s not actually some absolute number of users I want. What I want is for the fediverse to have that same “there’s a community for anything” that reddit had.

I’m starting to hope the fediverse doesn’t get too big now, honestly. There’s a certain number of eyeballs that is going to attract people interested in exploiting those eyeballs, and I don’t know if the fediverse is robust enough to fight them off as the pot of gold they see begins to overflow. It’s hard balance to find. And maybe the decentralized aspect of the fediverse does mean that it can’t be fully assimilated by capital, I don’t know.

Were living in interesting times.

social platform are boring and dying without users you can communicate with.

for 5 users, a fediverse is a huge overdesign.

Because the last decade has shown the rather terrible consequences of private, proprietary and profit-driven networks like Twitter and Meta’s various crap becoming de facto part of the common infrastructure of public life. A lot of public transit services publish service updates on Twitter. Most politicians have a Twitter presence. Many restaurants and small businesses don’t even have websites anymore - just Facebook pages.

We want to stop exploitative for-profit entities from furthering their stranglehold on essential parts of everyday life. Nobody should be forced against their will to use crap like Facebook or Twitter, and that means advancing viable alternatives to those platforms that can fill the role they do in the internet era. If the “digital town square” idea is to live on, it should be as a commons like an actual town square, not a publicly-traded company or a billionaire’s personal cult compound.

I think the biggest deal about Fediverse is it gives users control instead of companies. Most of social networks are controlled by big tech companies, the fact Fediverse can’t be controlled by companies but users makes me feel commited to it. Fediverse could be as good as we want.

I’m not online so I can stare at websites, and any website will do. I want discussions, people and content. A platform with five users, as you say, has relatively little value to me unless they’re like my best friends.

Well, the destruction of Twitter AND Reddit, especially so close to each other, is leaving a hole in my heart.

The magic of the “fediverse” can be both a bandaid and a fix.

A shiny, new replacement (Mastodon and Lemmy) for me to fall back on for comfort, and a new paradigm of social interaction (Fediverse) that will hopefully offer long-term immunity from assholes that want to destroy everything.

The more people on the Fediverse, the better it can become for everyone.

With Lemmy and an open source app on an open source platform you’re owning the means of production. We don’t need mass adoption, just enough users with a higher level of engagement. We’re now there, or close.

For continued development and more content.