I feel that it is time to have an honest discussion on the state of the fediverse.
Mastodon was founded a decade ago, and since then has roughly 1 million monthly active users. That is 0.25% of the MAU of twitter/X currently (which has itself seen declines over the years).
Pixelfed has 250k monthly active users, which is 0.008% of Instagrams 3 billion MAU.
Friendica has 5000 MAU which is essentially 0% of the 3.1 billion MAU that Facebook has.
Overall, even if you combine every fediverse platform together, and count bluesky as a part of the fediverse as well, it’s still less than 1% of the MAU of X.
Which is all to say, alternatives to corporate owned platforms does not exist at this point in time, on a statistical basis. Not in any meaningful way.
So why is this do we think? Why does the most popular social media site in the world not even have a decent competitor out there, when we have the technology to build one? It’s certainly not from a lack of user interest. Search terms like “facebook alternatives” have absolutely skyrocketed to unprecedented levels in the last couple years, as the realities of corporate oligarchy have become to hard for the average person to ignore. Governments and organizations around the world have started discussing the alternatives to American owned tech companies. And yet, growth of the fediverse platforms is essentially flat. People try a platform, and then quickly bounce off, either returning to old platforms or quitting social media all together.
That second one is not a problem in my mind, but let’s dive a bit deeper into the first point. Why do people not tend to stick around on the fediverse? Here are some potential root causes I can think of:
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The choices are overwhelming. There are dozens of fediverse platforms that provide every function under the sun. Even within a single platform, users are asked to pick a server, which is an instant friction point for users.
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Functionality on the fediverse is subpar compared to larger platforms, and the functionalities that do exist are disjointed between multiple platforms. We have events, but no standard event functionality integrated into mastodon. What does exist is a hack/workaround, rather than an actual implementation. Pixelfed does not have stories. There is a marketplace website for the fediverse (Flohmarkt), but no marketplace integration for friendica. Etc, etc.
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Users are afraid of losing their history and friends on other platforms. Every social media platform is required by law to provide a GDPR export of a users social media data, but no platform that I am aware of is using this to integrate a users post history or subscriptions to rebuild users social graph and profile on the fediverse. There are technical hurdles there for sure, but there are a lot of opportunities being left on the table.
So those are, imo, the biggest stumbling blocks to the growth of users on the fediverse, and why 99% of users bounce off when they try it. I am building some solutions to these problems myself, but I’m curious to hear what others think about this, and the honest state of the fediverse. Any issues I overlooked? Should we care about user growth at all? What do we think?
It’s true that the network effect is a huge blocker to the larger success of the fediverse. Facebook solved this early on by making your profile “you”, so users could just search for a name of someone you know, and they pop up. The fediverse doesn’t work like that, currently.
I take quite a bit of issue with the last paragraph. It’s like saying “what do you think this is, some kind of social media platform”, when someone is looking for a place to post updates for relatives. You tell them to just text them. Sure, they could do that but it is by no means as seamless and easy to browse your history of content as something like Facebook or Instagram. You don’t get birthday reminders or mundane life updates through group text. How about bands or artists that want a profile to share their music or art? Should they text their followers too? Overall, I think it is a bit of a ridiculous statement and distracts from the topic at hand, which is how do we make the fediverse better and able to reach it’s full potential? Sure there are alternatives to social media out there. That’s not what we are talking about here.
You bring up a really good point about how Facebook once provided a really good and convenient service. Being able to have automated reminders and a place to send well wishes for birthdays is convenient. The same for having a central place to share photos with contacts rather than having to maintain a personal webpage or print slides and gather everyone over for a viewing party with a slide projector. It’s easier to say “follow my Facebook/Instagram/Twitter page” than it is to say “subscribe to my mailing list” and then maintain it.
That’s why the platforms became so popular in the first place. If that was still the primary function we’d probably still be there. But instead we have the choice to make. Whether we will put up with the enshittification in order to maintain access the neglected vestiges of what of what once made these platforms great; or if we maintain our freedom and go back to the old less convenient ways.
The fediverse won’t ever really be a replacement for those functions, the network effect is a filter for that. But it’s also not really designed to be, it’s meant to be pseudo-anonymous, decentralized, distributed, and portable and ephemeral. Great for being able to make arbitrary posts to a small network, easy to pick up your things and leave. It’s not great for putting your personal details on it and hoping your friends find you (there could be issues with federation keeping them from finding you, there is nothing keeping someone from impersonating you on the network)
I believe the fediverse is healthy for its use case, I don’t believe it will ever fully achieve the use cases of the platforms it’s replacing and that’s ok with me. I (and 1M+ of MAU on the the fediverse) find it perfectly fine for its use case
Edit: I may have misread your point and gone on a huge aside but my point is that I’m ok with the threaded platforms not chasing users to get to critical Reddit mass, I don’t see how mastodon can really be any easier to use, and friendica is more translating the fediverse experience to a familiar Facebook like interface than being a Facebook replacement. I think that maintaining the network is more important than recruiting people outside of it. If it’s a good experience, people will come in their own time.
Your last sentence highlights my primary point. How do we make the fediverse a good experience? That is the crux of my issue, and what I think is lacking. For 99+% of users, it is not a good experience currently, and I would like to understand how we can change that. I acknowledge the power of the network effect, but I do not think it is insurmountable or unable to be used to the advantage of the fediverse if we think creatively.