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:

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • hitagi@ani.socialEnglish
    2·
    5 hours ago

    I don’t think the Fediverse will surpass mainstream social media by any means. I genuinely don’t believe there will be a day where any Fediverse platform will reach even a tenth of the userbase of its mainstream counterpart.

    The current trend of Fediverse platforms seems to operate in this way: “make X ActivityPub compatible” where X is any existing or emerging mainstream platform. A good example is Loops which, I feel is completely disconnected from the TikTok userbase that it attempts to capture. TikTok is very popular precisely because of its addictive algorithm and I’m not sure if the ethics of Loops will follow in that direction.

    Although the Fediverse population is small, I think it’s pretty resilient at least. We’re all here because of a shared ideal of “social media” that isn’t owned by a single entity. Unless users outside the Fediverse share the same ideal, it is unlikely they’ll stick around.

    The three problems listed on your post have pretty much been the same for the past three years and I don’t think anyone has made a good solution for it (otherwise, it would have blown up by now). There are so many suggestions like making a quiz or choosing a random instance but we all know those come with their own flaws. I don’t know how many years it will take for us to solve this problem but I’m always happy to see new attempts at solving them. The funny thing though is that some of these solutions rely on centralization…

    However, in my opinion, I think we are approaching the Fediverse wrong. The current expectation is it to eventually replace mainstream social media (it won’t). There is an obsession with a grand narrative or even a utopia.

    In my opinion, the “new” problem of the Fediverse should be this:

    “How do you build a platform with decentralization first in mind?”

    If we start thinking about this question, then problems like “choosing a server” should be irrelevant. I think about this question almost every day and I’m always on the look out for new platforms (both Fediverse and non-Fediverse) that hopefully aren’t just “X but ActivityPub”. I hope there will be more effort put into developing a platform where choosing an instance isn’t thought to be a hindrance but is actually part of the experience. A platform where we aren’t actively trying to “hide” decentralization.

    The question might sound stupid for some but just try to think about how we’re always chasing after mainstream social media and never really coming up with something original and unique where features are designed around decentralized interactions first.

    I don’t have the answers to this problem but I hope we can change the way we think about the Fediverse.