Communick is a commercial provider for messaging (Matrix) and ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, PixelFed, GoToSocial, PixelFed) services. To get an account at any of its instances, you need to be a paying customer.

FYI: communick pledges to take 20% of the profits from its hosting services and give to the open source developers of the underlying projects. So, the more people signing up to the $29/year package, the more we can support the developers from Mastodon, Lemmy, Funkwhale and Matrix.

This might seem like a clever way to say “sour grapes” to me. Saying that “little content is good because it avoids endless scrolling” is as weird as saying “living in the desert is good because it helps me control my diet”.

To address the point: activity seems very much slowed down, and we have two years since the Reddit “exodus” and very little progress to show. We are yet to convert any significant significant community, most people just accepted the status quo and you can bet that the few active people around here still rely on Reddit to find content and repost here.

Aside from this meta-discussion about Lemmy and the Fediverse, there is basically no native group or community emerging.

Stop browsing by /all. The firehose will always have content that is of dubious categorization. Instead of trying to change the whole world to conform to your tastes, curate your communities and leave others be.

But we are animals who can recognize and control whatever urges we have. We don’t need to act on them. It might feel cathartic to be able to compile some huge list of BS made-up by a troll, but more likely than not the troll simply will not care. At best it’s your time and energy being wasted with someone that does not deserve it, at worst is just a place that will amplify the toxicity that is already too prevalent here.

Anyway, I was never a fan of drama communities and I really wish we toned down on the Fediverse “meta-discussion”. For an outsider, this type of community seems like an excellent source of material to justify why the Fediverse is not a friendly place.

Oh no, there are idiots in the internet! Let’s engage and let them live rent-free in our heads!

FYI, I don’t think we are supposed to sympathize with https://xkcd.com/386

What’s stopping small businesses and influencers

There is nothing stopping them, but there is no one here that wants them to come:

• Scroll around for a bit on the federated timeline of your preferred Mastodon instance, tell me how long it takes for someone to display an anti-business sentiment.
• There is no one coordinated movement to get creators on YouTube and tell them “hey, if you start putting your videos on PeerTube we will contribute to your Patreon”.
• Every and any effort to build a public searchable index of the Fediverse was attacked on the grounds of “I don’t want my data used by marketers”.
• The majority view on “how to best fund the Fediverse” is “set up donations”. Whenever I bring up “I think it’s more fair if everyone paid just a little bit, this is why my instance is only for paying members”, I am immediately treated as an evil capitalist pig.

What reporters?

There were a number of reporters from the NYT/WSJ/CNN who set up Mastodon accounts in 2022 and were harassed on Mastodon.

Does this, by the way, not depend on the instance?

Do you think that Fediverse is a good representation of the overall political spectrum?

What “different people” is the Fediverse afraid of?

• Normies.
• Small business who want to have a social media presence.
• Influencers.
• Reporters.
• Anyone who is not 100% aligned with their political mindset

No idea.

People went to Mastodon and faced a number of UX issues:

• onboarding was difficult
• “Selecting an instance” is a chore
• How to find content
• No algorithmic recommendations

Because getting content was hard, they were basically thrown into a whole new ecossytem and were greeted by the OG Mastodon users, who were not at all welcoming: , complaining about “their space” being invaded, had many displays of “opression olympics”, made a point of being extra loud about their extremist views as an attempt to scare normies, demanded everyone to learn “proper manners” right away, put content warnings on anything, etc.

In other words, people didn’t go to Mastodon in 2024 because those that tried in 2022 were shunned away and left with the impression that the Fediverse is not for them.

I don’t know how you think the fediverse is somehow afraid of growth though.

For the reasons above. It’s not that they are “afraid of growth”, but the general culture on the Fediverse is reactionary and averse to change. Making it more universally appealing would mean bringing different people, and this is what they are afraid of.

The Bluesky surge happened after a massive global election result and a massive grievance from progressives/leftists over Musk and how Twitter has become

Why didn’t they go to Mastodon? (hint: some of them did in 2022)

If Reddit fucks up, as a reaction - Lemmy would get many new users.

Or perhaps there will be some other platform that is not so afraid of growth like Lemmy is, and people will go there, just like people went to Bluesky instead of going to Mastodon?

Bluesky itself is also flatlining and declining anyway.

Yeah, but my point is that they were a lot more effective in capturing mindshare when it was needed, and they didn’t see growth as compromise on their values like people do here.

When the next fuckup from Big Tech comes around, do you think that people will think about going to Mastodon/Lemmy/PieFed, or they will just look at Bluesky?

But why are you comparing Bluesky’s numbers with Lemmy’s. A more apt comparison would be against the whole Fediverse. We had ~2 million people in early 2023, and we’ve gone down since then.

When do you think Bluesky started?

It was announced in 2019 as an internal Twitter project, but it became its own thing in 2021-ish. Then they spent two years reinventing a bunch of things so that they could keep Twitter’s original view - i.e, a system where they could delegate all the boring/liability heavy parts to users (identity, UGC) while keeping them in control of rent-seeking toll gates (the AppView).

The people behind it were several orders of magnitude more well known.

It takes more than money and a good contact network to build something that can attract people. Jack nowadays is pushing for Nostr, but as a product it is a lot less appealing to the masses compared to Bluesky.

Network effects are incredibly strong

Yet, Bluesky has grown to 35M+ active accounts, even though they started way after us

We have the advantage that we’re not growth focused

This is not an “advantage”. This is an excuse we tell ourselves to cope with our failures.

The inevitable enshittification will do its job eventually,

And when it does, the majority of people will go the next shiny “free as in beer”, VC-funded siloed platform and we are going to be just another “They don’t know” meme.

Isn’t it a little bit sad to think that the best we can do here is to wait for everyone else to get pissed at Big Tech’s fuckups?

Yeah, both. It’s flatlining globally and down in the UK.