As users flee from Twitter/X, two visions of social media's future compete: Mastodon's community-controlled network versus Bluesky's venture-backed promises. The difference isn't just technical—it's about whether we'll finally break free from the profit-driven cycle that has degraded every major social platform.
What “kickstart”? The fediverse isn’t a commercial venture. If we can connect with our friends and interests, it’s already “working”. I find fantastic new people here all the time, doing really niche stuff I’d never find on a platform focused on appealing to everyone.
If “99%” of people aren’t on it, that’s perfectly acceptable, and just makes it easier for the ones on it to find and talk to their friends. I don’t think we need or want the vast torrent of spammers, downvote bots, and “influencer” types who use whatever gives them clicks.
Fediverse can’t sustain many niche communities with its level of activity. Even gaming communities on lemmy don’t have enough traffic to constitute communities for individual games. I can’t do after-episode TV discussions on Lemmy because there wouldn’t be enough people commenting to warrant it. If I wanted to search for a D&D game in my local community (a huge US city), I couldn’t do it via Lemmy.
I can do all this on reddit, which I intend for Lemmy to replace, but I can’t do that yet. So I still crawl reddit for the needs Lemmy can’t replace, but I’d rather never have to open reddit in the first place.
Same is true for every alternative platform on Fediverse. I’m still using all the mainstream apps I intend to replace.
What “kickstart”? The fediverse isn’t a commercial venture. If we can connect with our friends and interests, it’s already “working”. I find fantastic new people here all the time, doing really niche stuff I’d never find on a platform focused on appealing to everyone.
If “99%” of people aren’t on it, that’s perfectly acceptable, and just makes it easier for the ones on it to find and talk to their friends. I don’t think we need or want the vast torrent of spammers, downvote bots, and “influencer” types who use whatever gives them clicks.
Fediverse can’t sustain many niche communities with its level of activity. Even gaming communities on lemmy don’t have enough traffic to constitute communities for individual games. I can’t do after-episode TV discussions on Lemmy because there wouldn’t be enough people commenting to warrant it. If I wanted to search for a D&D game in my local community (a huge US city), I couldn’t do it via Lemmy.
I can do all this on reddit, which I intend for Lemmy to replace, but I can’t do that yet. So I still crawl reddit for the needs Lemmy can’t replace, but I’d rather never have to open reddit in the first place.
Same is true for every alternative platform on Fediverse. I’m still using all the mainstream apps I intend to replace.