this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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Fediverse
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Slow growth is incompatible with anything that requires network effects.
And if we are talking about quality alone, then the Fediverse products are already lagging behind Bluesky and Nostr, and the current user base is so reactionary that trend will be that we'll keep losing ground.
Because this will only become interesting once we have a critical mass. 50k MAU is far from if. If we grow 10% YoY, we will certainly lose out to someone else who is willing to grow faster.
For all "Reddit's troubles" last year, they still managed to have revenue growth of 21% to more than $800 million.
I really disagree. Yeah, there are many issues to solve, but content is king and we simply don't have it. The current experience with Lemmy can be summarized as:
It's only appealing for the terminally online. There is nothing for normies to be minimally curious about. The reason that, e.g, my wife, still has Facebook installed and never cared about installing a Lemmy client is not because of "technical challenges" but Facebook has groups that she likes to follow and nothing interesting to her here.
Fediverse communities, yes. "News", not at all.
See how fast the number of active users drop.
So we agree that we need to have more users, no?
I have actual data that support the idea that more content can create a virtuous cycle. People loved to complain about alien.top "spamming their feed", but when the mirror bots were active, the numbers of "organic participation" and subscriber count was increasing faster than the most popular communities on the bigger instances. I kept quiet about it to avoid "inverse Streisand effect" (like the haters pontificating about "these communities are only bots" and spoiling for those who actually didn't care about interacting with it).