Don’t get me wrong I’m a big fan but it seems like the fediverse could theoretically exist with like 5 users whereas a commercial company needs users for revenue. It feels like we are using the masters tools to try to destroy the masters house
A lot of community types just simply don’t work without a minimum critical mass of members.
Imagine asking a programming question on a software development community of just 5 people. You end up with 3 people who aren’t active enough to see the question, 1 person sees but doesn’t have an answer and doesn’t respond (classic lurker), and one person sees it and responds that they don’t know the answer. Now imagine a community of 5 thousand people…it’s suddenly much more feasible to even bother asking the question.
Sure, fediverse could exist with just 5 people, but it would be worthless and pointless.
yea the reason to want more users is for niche communities, I don’t need a billion people just for memes or news, but when you subdivide your users down to niche communities suddenly you’ll want more
I wish there were more people on Lemmy talking about Deus Ex, The 7th Guest, DOS games, Randomizers, or specific TV shows that I’m currently watching (Reddit always had a pretty active sub for each and every show)
One could make the argument that 5000 users is still not mass adoption. If that is enough activity, then mass adoption is not a requirement for the fediverse to be a nice social place to be.
5,000 users in a niche community would need hundreds of millions in the wider network.
This is how bulletin boards used to work. The most successful were focused on a niche and one with 5,000 users would be big enough to be of use to people interested in that niche. But when your niche is part of a much larger community covering all niches, that community needs to be vast to get 5,000 subscribing to any given niche.
I think the biggest deal about Fediverse is it gives users control instead of companies. Most of social networks are controlled by big tech companies, the fact Fediverse can’t be controlled by companies but users makes me feel commited to it. Fediverse could be as good as we want.
I think I understand your comment, so my question is why are so many people up in arms about Threads taking over or destroying the Fediverse?
If meta makes special features threads only and once they have a corner on the market start defederating, it could suck other already decently popular services dry (mastodon) since they either move to threads or lose any connections they had on threads. In the end, a cool decentralized thing becomes just another corpo social network.
Sorry I’m fairly new to all this, does defederating mean you break connections to the larger fediverse?
Like I make a server that has 5 people on it and then defederate the server, those 5 people now can’t communicate with the fediverse at large?
It’s about the network effect. As it stands now, the network effect is built on the backs of many different nodes on the network all contributing together.
But as you’ve seen, the amount of people on the network is nothing compared to the total of all the Threads users (~30mil). Once they federate with the rest of the network they will provide a MASSIVE boost to it’s enharent value. As people from other instances connect with friends, brands and public figures and alert services on Threads they are slowly becoming dependent on that content.
The users on Threads are not going to be as privacy or technology curious. Almost all of them will be existing Instagram users. They’re not going to move to another instance, especially if they can’t keep using the threads app, which could have features the other instances don’t support.
Almost all social media platforms have this network effect because they were first and/or strategically built their network.
Facebook utilized Universities, requiring uni email address to register and they had features that made it easy to connect with your classmates. Once they hit a critical mass they opened it public.
Twitter piggy backed off of the 2007 SXSWi conference. Displaying pubic Twitter feeds from users at the event on large LCD TVs, they connected users with a similar occupation and intrist. Sending their tweets per day from 20,000 to 60,000.
Threads is building it’s network on the back of Instagram while also on the back of Twitters failings. They’re co-opting the bad vibes of Elon Musk to syphon users off the platform.
Ultimately, there will be a short term boon in the perceived “value” of the fediverse, and in reality, Threads and Meta will make up a large percentage of that value. Over time, people will have become accustomed to the content Threads provides and when Meta nolonger needs to be federated, people will leave with them.
Because, like it or not, what normies do on social media matters. I, for one, don’t want fuckwads like Zuckerberg, Musk and Spez to continue to be able to skew the conversation in the proverbial town square e.g. during the 2024 election.
Centralized, corporate-controlled social media is literally a threat to democracy.
I’m keen on having as many communities as possible. Having things silo’d into a few mega hubs is a recipe for disaster. Having a concentration of users all in 1 or 2 spaces where there’s no transparency from administrators / moderators is what we should have all learned from Reddit and their recent nonsense.
The fediverse is the best chance any of us have of experience an internet free of tech oligopolies, that’s the biggest difference for me.
Of course mass adoption would make it more likely to have lively niche communities, but most importantly, I think it should be a right for people to exist on the internet without a massive corporation trying to turn them into a nutjob for monetary gain.
