this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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Even if Mastodon and other Fediverse platform gains are 1% of the gains of BlueSky or anything else, it's still cause for celebration and to welcome new friendly faces with open arms.
When the Reddit API-calypse happened, I don’t think anyone expected Lemmy to have more users than Reddit or anywhere even close to a similar number. But Lemmy.ca went from around 40 active users in April 2023 to hundreds, and then to 2k over 3 months, most people being friendly and ready for something different.
Quantity isn't everything. There is an innumerable amount of things that could be better about Mastodon, Lemmy and other Fediverse software and sure, mass-adoption could help with niche content. However the way the Fediverse is set up, it is resistant to all the sacrifices other platforms had to make in the long run to be more profitable. Musk-boi could "buy" Mastodon, Spez could "buy" Lemmy.world and ml, and Zucker-bot could "buy" Pixelfed tomorrow, but that wouldn't stop anyone from forking those platforms and leaving the main instances. The distributed nature makes it hard for a monopolist to capture.
That right there hits the nail on the head. There is a certain critical mass, an activity level that makes satisfy most discussion needs for most users. It's a tiny fraction of the total traffic of a place like Reddit or Twitter.
But if we have that, and keep the quality level up, we can succeed.
Success to me doesn't mean killing Reddit and Twitter. It means creating a place where smart people can come and find enough content and discussion that they don't need Reddit and Twitter.
Or going someplace in the Fediverse that's neither Mastodon nor Lemmy nor Pixelfed.
People just very badly want to not know about other fediverse platforms for some reason.
Reason #1: It overloads them mentally. It was hard enough to wrap their minds around Mastodon not being the one website they thought it is.
Reason #2: They got so used to their nice and cosy and fluffy and friendly woolly mammoth being the entire Fediverse, and everything they ever interact with being Mastodon, that everything they (might) have to interact with that is not Mastodon is too much of a disturbance. There being something else in the Fediverse other than Mastodon simply feels too wrong.