Yeah but if you had to search for it you’d have a trouble spelling it. Flowmarked would be how English speakers would hear that I think.

It probably needs an English brand name for outside the germano-sphere - fedimarket?

I’m guessing it’s automated stupidity. Meta has cut staff and we’re seeing the results.

Much of the big tech companies have done this over the past year or two, and also been pushing “AI” to replace roles like moderation. I think we’re seeing the results of over relying on AI and cutting staff to boost share prices.

Lets face it, Meta is dying; Facebook is declining, and Instagram seems to be in decline too, the pivot to VR failed and the pivot to AI will fail. It’s best chance seems to be trying to get its hands on TikTok in the US and even that is hardly going to drive the company forward.

Yeah I think this is a very important point.

I think people will need to learn to accept that there is no such thing as “free”. The current social media sells you to advertisers, taking every bit of data they can get.

So for independent and privacy focused social media, we’re going to have to accept we have to pay for it.

I’ve moved to paying for my email, my file storage, my VPN and my password manager - all for privacy and security. I pay for subscriptions for streaming to avoid advertising. So I would pay for social media.

In the early days of the internet, people accepted paying for things but then the “free” model came along. The fediverse will need to persuade people to pay for it. That may limit it from being the big everyone social medial, but it could be able to become the high quality version of social media that people pay for.

The way to grow the fediverse is getting real life communities to build local instances and connect them up with others.

A good example is Universities - these are dynamic communities pf young people that could benefit from campus wide social networks of Mastodon, Lemmy, pixelfed etc. Joining these up with other university networks would create shared spaces, and as people graduate and leave university they would hopefully continue to participate in broader genera sharedl communities.

Other communities to target might be small towns, neighbourhoods or even cities.

This is exactly how Facebook grew. It target universities and green organically - although it did also use an idea of “exclusivity” and invites to draw people in to the network which may not be feasible for the fedoverse. But the “local social network” to “global social network” itself is a viable route to growth.

So instead of people trying to persuade individuals to join a global network they should be thinking about how they can support exisitng local or small groups onto things like a campus social network. Sports clubs, hobby groups, and even just popular shared hobbies and unterests. Things that people are already in communities for but may appreciate their own locally controlled instances of fediverse tools which they can federate into bigger whole.

Localism is a big strength for the fediverse and is where I’d target growth.