I keep seeing more and more traffic to my sites from the fediverse. I think the centralized social network model is in deep shit, at least as far as the WWW goes. The days of zero interest money and investment based only on user counts are over and traditional social networks are increasingly irrelevant. TikTok is obviously not in deep shit but that’s a separate can of worms.
I really don't see centralized social networks bring competitive with the fediverse for much longer. After all, how do you convince millions of people to use your service and pay for it while you spy on them, sell every scrap of data you can, and even then still show them invasive ads?
Meanwhile mastodon is free as in freedom. If you want to, you can buy your admin a beer. People seem to like this arrangement quite a lot. You, an individual, are giving money directly to another individual for services they're providing to you with zero obligations. It feels more like buying your plumber friend a case of beer for fixing your sink and less like throwing money into a corporate void for no discernible benefit as the price slowly and invariably creeps upward.
The really cool part though is that centralized social media has to compete with the fediverse, but the fediverse does not need to compete. It's not interested in competing. It will simply continue to exist for as long as there are users. No one cares what percentage of the global population uses it, or about infinite geometric growth forever. It's just people talking to other people. It's not an experience that you get on traditional social media anymore.
The public at large doesn't care about any of that at all. I don't think mastodon will ever grow that large due to how painful the signup process is. And that's fine! But we have to acknowledge that only a very small portion of people care about things like privacy to the point of uprooting their social media where their friends are.
AT Proto is more interesting than ActivityPub anyway, but I think BlueSky will eventually succeed because the signup is painless. You just sign up on bluesky, there's no need of discussion on which instance, etc. There's no worry about losing everything if the particular instance you're on goes down, or having to deal with migrations.
That there is any discussion on "what" instance to join. I understand this is the whole point of being a decentralized system, but your average person doesn't care about that for social media. Maybe I'm wrong and mastodon.social is perceived in that way similarly to how bsky.app is for Bluesky.
I haven't followed mastodon in some time but the account migration thing was a pain as well, which I feel that the AT Protocol addresses much better.
Mastodon.social. These enormous monolithic servers offer the worst experience and degrade the whole network. And now joinmastodon.org points you at mastodon.social first, then a list of the largest servers.
>I think the centralized social network model is in deep shit, at least as far as the WWW goes.
Meta just beat Q4 estimates by 10%. Just because you're seeing more traffic to your site from the fediverse doesn't mean that traditional social media is dying.
You can beat estimates for a while by ramping up prices and cutting staff and costs.
Facebook has, among other things, cut their developer support to basically zero. Bugs in the APIs sit around for years. The Groups API is just being discontinued entirely.
I imagine strategically they all think they got what they needed out of being an open platform and don't need to do it anymore. I guess we'll find out if that's true or if someone can take their bacon.
> Facebook has, among other things, cut their developer support to basically zero.
They're still doing well on PyTorch at least! Although they did drop GPU support for Windows soon after the WSL2 became usable (presumably because now users could just install the Linux version on Win)
Come on, it's hard to deny that the last year has proven that the vast majority don't leave when platforms like Reddit and Twitter succumb to extreme enshittification. The eternal September is passive and docile.
Those sites are already spiritually dead in the sense that they're only tolerated and no longer enjoyed. But they've achieved too big a network effect to be replaced anytime soon.
The minority that was producing quality content for free may have left. But the content is still there, so as long the content itself is still relevant, you will have users (I've deleted my Reddit account, but still go there for some searches)
