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:
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?
if we’re going by numbers, you mentioned how many users are active on each platform. then you mentioned “Search terms like “facebook alternatives” have absolutely skyrocketed to unprecedented levels in the last couple years”. What are those numbers? Is that growth in line with what is happening in the growth of the new platforms? I don’t have that answer, but that is also not based on complete data. What I am describing is 35ish years of repeating patterns, and the realities of commerce and human nature. Every platform has followed the pattern of “die a hero, or live long enough to become the victim.” And I don’t even just mean social media, hell I don’t even just mean the Internet. Is it defeatist to say “enjoy what you have and don’t try to be just like the others since they’ve consistently followed a path that is clearly NOT what you want?” I’m all for scale, I’m all for new users. But there is a breaking point where you have to sell ads or data or die and that’s just economics. I feel like I’m being as honest about limitations as you are, I’m just applying psychology and history to it.
tl;dr: Growth good. Users and new tech good. Trying to replicate the numbers of behemoths without acknowledging the same path they all took to get there is how you create more. Or die trying due to lack of resources to maintain it.
I am not suggesting we take the same path to get to tech behemoth size. I am not evening saying that reaching tech behemoth size is a good thing or something to strive for. But could we at least try to register on the scale at all, and could we do that in a way that sticks to a set of morals and ethics from the ground up of the platforms architecture? It’s one thing to say “enjoy the platform for what it is”, it’s another to say “what it is is what it always will be” or even what it should be. It is far from what it should be imo, which is the whole point of the post.
That. I am saying I have never seen a path to that, and I don’t see it. If someone can figure out how to create a space where the world lives and grows to a size where everyone knows about it, and stays there. It never passes that level, and is able to maintain some set of ethics it was built on, and never be taken over or replaced by some massive amount of money from someone else as soon as it’s big enough to be on the radar…I feel like I just wrote an entire statement of conflicting statements. But I’d gladly say sign me up and admit I’m the asshole if it can be done that way on this planet with these humans.
You’re turning a practical functionality discussion into a philosophical debate. I am asking “how can we make the fediverse better and realize it’s true potential”, and your response is “why bother, it’s gonna get enshittified anyway?”. How is that a productive or useful conversation to have?
You started with comparing usage numbers, and to me that is more about sociology and economics than tech at this point. If you’re talking about “true potential” in a vacuum, great. Functionality for the win. I don’t think using any of the others as a model, a comparison, a goal, a thought in basically any way, results in attempting to follow a path that is what I already described. “How can I be better?” vs “How can I get closer to what they are without becoming them?”
User numbers are a basic health metric of any platform. Sociology and economics are very related to the practical functionality of a platform. If users find it too tedious or confusing to use, they won’t use it. If they don’t get good or consistent performance due to poorly optimized infrastructure, them they will not stick around.
I am not saying to use others as models. I am saying that there are basic functionalities that don’t exist in a fully formed way on the fediverse, like private messages or events. This is not some novel concept that Facebook invented but they have done it in a clean and polished way that users appreciate. When they try alternatives on the fediverse, the difference is jarring. That is the discussion I am hoping to have here, not about some theoretical end state of social media platforms operating within a capitalist system that may or may not be based in data or fact.