The merits of a social media provider are worthless if it has a fraction of the population of a direct competitor.
No they aren’t, the network effect isn’t some magical all powerful force of nature that you cannot resist.
We can choose to join a community that is small and help grow it, frankly if people aren’t able to grapple with that I don’t think they are ready to come here anyways which isn’t to say that the fediverse doesn’t need to work on becoming way more accessible and friendly to the average person.
You grossly overestimate the average social media user’s willingness to make an effort to create a Thing when that same Thing already exists in a usable state under a different name; and yes, for the purpose of having a Twitter-like microblog, Mastodon and Bluesky are identical.
if people aren’t able to grapple with that I don’t think they are ready to come here anyways
And they didn’t. It continues happening in real time, and the value gap between Mastodon and Bluesky, from the average social media user’s perspective, continues to grow. Thinking that a handful of libre-minded people can change that is wishful thinking bordering on delusion.
Thinking that a handful of libre-minded people can change that is wishful thinking bordering on delusion.
My point is that it is unreasonable to compare the popularity of a scam being hyped by some of the biggest names in the techbro world with direct access and influence over the mainstream tech press and millions in cash to spend on advertisements, luring in big social media accounts and making a slick UI and onboarding process and most crucially lots of time to hold off on enshittification/monetization…with a community developed fundamentally decentralized constellation of people who are maintaining and developing the fediverse on a budget that is peanuts compared to the literally astronomically larger budget Bluesky has.
The danger with leaving this context out is it leads you into thinking rich people are smarter and have better ideas than you when they are really just richer than you and every single interaction in society is structured to benefit them and defer to their preferred narratives.
Bluesky was always going to grow more explosively than the fediverse, the whole fundamental issue with corporate social media is the immutable need for endless growth that supercedes any moral concern and indeed any concern for the longterm at all.
There is no use lamenting the fact that the fediverse isn’t growing at the clip bluesky is, and there is the very real danger of getting caught up in the hype and losing sight of why it is unreasonable to hold the fediverse to the same expectations of nearterm growthrate.
No they aren’t, the network effect isn’t some magical all powerful force of nature that you cannot resist.
We can choose to join a community that is small and help grow it, frankly if people aren’t able to grapple with that I don’t think they are ready to come here anyways which isn’t to say that the fediverse doesn’t need to work on becoming way more accessible and friendly to the average person.
You grossly overestimate the average social media user’s willingness to make an effort to create a Thing when that same Thing already exists in a usable state under a different name; and yes, for the purpose of having a Twitter-like microblog, Mastodon and Bluesky are identical.
And they didn’t. It continues happening in real time, and the value gap between Mastodon and Bluesky, from the average social media user’s perspective, continues to grow. Thinking that a handful of libre-minded people can change that is wishful thinking bordering on delusion.
My point is that it is unreasonable to compare the popularity of a scam being hyped by some of the biggest names in the techbro world with direct access and influence over the mainstream tech press and millions in cash to spend on advertisements, luring in big social media accounts and making a slick UI and onboarding process and most crucially lots of time to hold off on enshittification/monetization…with a community developed fundamentally decentralized constellation of people who are maintaining and developing the fediverse on a budget that is peanuts compared to the literally astronomically larger budget Bluesky has.
The danger with leaving this context out is it leads you into thinking rich people are smarter and have better ideas than you when they are really just richer than you and every single interaction in society is structured to benefit them and defer to their preferred narratives.
Bluesky was always going to grow more explosively than the fediverse, the whole fundamental issue with corporate social media is the immutable need for endless growth that supercedes any moral concern and indeed any concern for the longterm at all.
There is no use lamenting the fact that the fediverse isn’t growing at the clip bluesky is, and there is the very real danger of getting caught up in the hype and losing sight of why it is unreasonable to hold the fediverse to the same expectations of nearterm growthrate.