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?

  • reedbend@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    2·
    13 hours ago

    I mean, sure, you can chase MAU numbers all you want (please don’t). The reality is that people are too lazy, busy, or overwhelmed to invest even two minutes’ thought/effort (for many people those are the same thing) into trying alternatives. And that’s okay - it’s going to have to be, because it’s not going to change. And if it did, then that type of person would be all up in your federated network.

    Personally, if 25 million normies joined microblogging fedi, I’d probably leave. I like microblogging fedi small & weird. The vibe on Bluesky is rancid as fuck and that’s where a lot of the normies went when Twitter got rebranded as a Nazi bar. Anyway, microblogging fedi is thriving based on the metric I care about, namely interesting conversations and interesting stuff to look at and people engaging with my project accounts.

    But if you want to talk the whys and wherefores - the Mastodon “dev process” is the single biggest impediment to Mastodon being, you know, good. And that’s a direct outgrowth of the mentality of the people who run it. Could I elaborate? Maybe. But (regardless of what my account info says) I’ve been on fedi more than 10 years, and I’ll just say, you’ll have to look into that yourself. Mastodon is not good software, and it’s not going to become good software. And many if not most of the other microblogging fedi platform apps are just not trying to have mass appeal. It’s not a goal of those projects. If you want it to be, you’ll probably have to fork one or build one from scratch.

    I hear there are similar issues with Lemmy and with Piefed. Personally, I’m posting from a Lemmy account, but I’ll be taking a much closer look at Piefed when I get my shit together to set up my own node. I don’t know if Piefed is trying for mass appeal or not, but even if the devs are, the federated nature of the threadiverse is by definition going to make it conceptually a bit harder to engage with, because there is necessarily going to be 15 communities for every topic, and that’s by design and working as intended. Federated social media was never going to be as “easy” to use as centralized megacorp social media, and will never be, and that’s by design, and that’s okay. It’s going to have to be, or you’ll need to switch to a centralized model.