this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
1242 points (97.0% liked)
Fediverse
28307 readers
459 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think it was definitely the super long beta period where you needed an invite killed it. I knew a ton of people who were interested that gave up
That's easy to say now, but Orkut (another Google social network, mostly used in Brazil) also had a beta invite system... And that helped it grow tremendously. The secrecy and "status" of getting invited made people go wild - they would even sell invites.
The strategy can work. It's just very timing sensitive.
Orkut was young when Facebook access was still restricted to college kids only. Google+ was dumb. You’d get and then it was just tumble weeds.
I'm not sure if I'm mis-remembering, but I believe my first Gmail account was by invitation. It was pretty much just an email account back then
Correct, I got my account invite from The Screensavers show with Kevin Rose. They were giving them out randomly to viewers.
Reminds me of Bluesky which is also in a permanent beta.