I think the biggest deal about Fediverse is it gives users control instead of companies. Most of social networks are controlled by big tech companies, the fact Fediverse can’t be controlled by companies but users makes me feel commited to it. Fediverse could be as good as we want.

There are many different visions for “success” of decentralized projects, some of which require/imply explosive growth and some do not. There are also some goals, such as diversity and inclusivity, which can have complicated relationships with the concept of “growth.”

I want all kinds of people (that are NOT BIGOTS) to be join the fediverse, participate safely and form their own communities^[1].

To achieve this, it’s beneficial for it to be easy for folks to join the fediverse at all, e.g., being able to easily find an instance and sign up for an account and not worry about the infrastructure or instance politics, and critically to be able to easily find one another and interact. These are also features that just fuel userbase growth generally.

But to sustain it, it’s necessary to have strong moderation (which in turn requires a manageable workload for mods) and to keep large pools of bad actors in check. It’s also important on a safety basis for many users to be less discoverable because high discoverability of marginalized users results in high rates of harassment by bigots. These are features that support a better and safer experience for people who are in the fediverse.

These things are directly in tension, which makes it very difficult to have a healthy fediverse. The result on Mastodon has been a bifurcation of “successful” (by different definitions) instances into, on the one hand, very large but poorly moderated instances with garbage fire local timelines but lots of people and lots of content to interact with, and, on the other hand, smaller, well moderated instances that flourish internally but can be hard to join or to interact with if you’re on one of the large instances.

Both models exert exclusionary forces in their own ways. If you keep everyone in your federation, and that includes nazis, then you are de facto participating in driving people who are targeted by nazis off of the network. But if your happy little closed instances are impossible to join and has a constraining monoculture, then a lot of other nice folks may get left out.

There’s not an easy solution to this. The situation for lemmy will be similar in some ways and different in others. The piece that worries me particularly is that instance politics questions become potentially more charged due to the fact that instances are hosting the communities^[2] and not just the users, plus there’s not yet a way to migrate communities.

The fediverse is the best chance any of us have of experience an internet free of tech oligopolies, that’s the biggest difference for me.
Of course mass adoption would make it more likely to have lively niche communities, but most importantly, I think it should be a right for people to exist on the internet without a massive corporation trying to turn them into a nutjob for monetary gain.

A lot of community types just simply don’t work without a minimum critical mass of members.

Imagine asking a programming question on a software development community of just 5 people. You end up with 3 people who aren’t active enough to see the question, 1 person sees but doesn’t have an answer and doesn’t respond (classic lurker), and one person sees it and responds that they don’t know the answer. Now imagine a community of 5 thousand people…it’s suddenly much more feasible to even bother asking the question.

Sure, fediverse could exist with just 5 people, but it would be worthless and pointless.

Because, like it or not, what normies do on social media matters. I, for one, don’t want fuckwads like Zuckerberg, Musk and Spez to continue to be able to skew the conversation in the proverbial town square e.g. during the 2024 election.

Centralized, corporate-controlled social media is literally a threat to democracy.

With Lemmy and an open source app on an open source platform you’re owning the means of production. We don’t need mass adoption, just enough users with a higher level of engagement. We’re now there, or close.

@vera Honestly I was on reddit for the nerds (people) not the company and that’s why I’m here now. Fortunately(?) I remember the internet before big social media and very comfortable with forums and boards. Can’t say I’m able to speak for anyone else though.