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?
You are not comparing like for like.
Twitter is pretty much 20 years old, so are Facebook, Reddit and YouTube.
In addition, they were essentially first of a kind in their niche.
The fediverse is not even a teenager and the growth spurt hasn’t set in and may never. In addition, the fediverse is utilitarian by comparison, not much beyond proof of concept. Apps, platforms and instances are fragile and evolving.
Basic things mostly work, but it’s not “cool” enough to tempt organisations to join, media companies, etc.
We barely agree on how things interact with each other, for example, Mastodon uses hashtags, Lemmy doesn’t.
Lemmy has communities, Mastodon doesn’t.
It’s not that one is better than the other, it’s still being worked out by the community.
You also have to remember that there have been many “failures” along the way. Geocities, MySpace, Usenet, AOL, bulletin boards and bang path addressing. The fediverse might succeed, whatever that means, or it might not.
I’m a user on Mastodon, Lemmy and Bluesky, they’re evolving day by day. I’m not sure if I could tell you what I like or dislike about each, they’re just different.
The fact that the fediverse is young and evolving is what excites me about it. There is tremendous potential, we just have to realize it.
Also, I will mention that part of why Facebook took off like it did, initially, was the ability to import friends from Myspace. This is much more complex and nearly impossible to do today, but I really think we need to look at social graph imports for the fediverse, to allow people a life raft from closed wall platforms. The failures of the past were not an accident, they were carefully planned out by other entities who did things better.
The fact that the fediverse is young and evolving is what excites me about it.
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!
I want Mastodon threads in Lemmy.
Won’t come.
Mastodon has no support for enclosed threaded conversations whatsoever. At all. Why not? Because Twitter has never had any either. That’s not how microblogging works. And Mastodon tries hard to be minimalist, purist, old-school, original-gangsta, Twitter-like microblogging, just with a few more characters.
Mastodon barely manages to tie its threads together with mentions. But it neither has nor supports nor even only understands the one-post-multiple-comments conversation model.
You even have to jump through hoops both on Mastodon’s Web UI and in every single last Mastodon app to see a whole thread. Like, actually the whole thread and not just the branch with the “toot” that you were just looking at.
And shit like that is why the Fediverse will ultimately fail.
On the one hand, Mastodon will kill the Fediverse.
On the other hand, for the majority of Mastodon users, Mastodon is the Fediverse. (Like, they literally don’t know that Mastodon is connected to something, anything, that isn’t Mastodon. They think that Mastodon is its own enclosed network.)
The irony.
I would argue that the lack of vision and the insular development culture of Mastodon combined with it claiming most of the users in microblogging fedi has done more to stunt ActivityPub than any other factor.
It isn’t even only that.
It’s people being told that the Fediverse equals Mastodon for simplicity reasons. Because that’s easier to understand than the Fediverse being a network of over 100 different apps with hundreds or thousands of servers each.
And it’s people being told that the Fediverse equals Mastodon because whoever tells them that believes it themself.
Most Mastodon onboarding is done by people who think that the Fediverse is only Mastodon. At least half of them will spontaneously shit brix once they come across a message from e.g. Friendica or Hubzilla for the first time.
The alternatives do exist and the 0.1% of people that want to use them, are. If more people want to use the fediverse in future thats great, but I don’t want to just get people lumped under a particular umbrella because it’s what I personally want. The fediverse doesn’t need to be the biggest social media platform for me to feel validated.
The fediverse is a tool. I don’t choose what tool to use based on what everyone’s favourite tool is. I base it on the job at hand
The Google trends I have seen are far more than 0.1% of people out there. I know many people personally who would love to leave Facebook, but there is no good alternative, and the issues I mentioned above are contributing factors. We can keep sticking our head in the sand and saying that it is what it is, and the fediverse will never grow because no one wants it, or we can try to understand why users are not being retained and seek to address those issues. It’s less about validation and more about providing real alternatives for people. I kind of thought that was what this whole thing was about.
But these are real alternatives. They’re real alternatives that by the nature of them being non corporate are more difficult to market, stick in a neat box for consumers. But that’s not a negative.
I agree with anything that removes friction and helps people get away from corporate captured social media but fundamentally at some point where this is what the fediverse is and it’s why it’s the way it is.
Yeah I don’t know if a lot of people remember. But the rise of much of current social media was not organic or natural.
I’ve been accessing the internet since the very early 90s. Started out through fidonet if anyone remembers that. Was on Usenet, IRC, ICQ, AIM, MSN, Jabber, GeoCities, MySpace, tumblr etc. So it’s not like I’m completely out of the loop with things going on on the internet Etc. I remember first time really hearing about Twitter. Was while watching cable news. One day all the guests and hosts started bringing it up constantly. And talking about it and how everyone should use it. I found it strange then and I still find the system strange today. It isn’t really much for the average person. At least for many it doesn’t do all that much more for them than a simple WordPress or geocities site would. Apart from feeding into a larger API that can be mined for data by a company.
