On big commercial social media, people think the websites they are on are a big deal: opinions you share there, people you interact with, engagement you receive. It must matter SO MUCH to them - especially to influencers who earn some money from it.
Well, commercial Web is an obvious fodder to the Fedi but what about other alternative social spaces? These small, timy websites with barely any activity on them… there’s no place for such delusions. They aren’t changing the world and they know it.
Fediverse, in comparison… oof. You see, it is the Future. If We succeed, the Evil will be defeated. The whole world depends on the few people who ended up on here. It is a quiet place now but it will inevitably become the most popular thing. The Year of Linux Fediverse is any day now!
This feel of self-importance and superiority leads to the level of drama almost on-par with the corporate socials which is highly unusual in such small online spaces, at least in my experience.
I’ve been trying to help on that for a while. Boosting, commenting, posting/crossposting… At worse, I just like/dislike since I can use that to make Ublock Origin auto-hiding posts on instances whose software doesn’t have native hiding. And I’d incentivize others to do so too, to ensure the network doesn’t whither.
But still, patiently being around for some 3 years now, my impression is that it’s growing quite nicely and quite fast too. Even more so if compared to the competition which’s been around for much longer. Iirc Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, for example, are some 20 y.o. already. Discord I find suspicious how fast it grew, but even then it’s older than most fediverse softwares too afaik, the oldest ones to my knowledge (not counting retrofitting ActivityPub) being Mastodon and Lemmy circa 2016~2017.
Still, having learned not to take things for granted, even if I don’t find it barren, I’d again incentivize others that see potential in this network to keep helping it stay relevant.
I wonder how many people realize the importance of independent platforms. Especially with what’s going on in politics, big tech, shaping discourse in a top-down way… All not really healthy for society. And we got an uptake in surveillance, manufactured truths, all the age-verification already cost us some internet forums in the UK… I think the Fediverse is more important than ever.
Did we grow, though? You say it like it’s accepted truth. But every time I have a look at the numbers (for example on Fediverse Observer), it seems to me like we’re doing the opposite. We peaked 3 years ago and we’ve been shrinking since. It’s even worse for platforms like Mastodon. Seems they’ve lost several hundreds of thousands of users. I’d say we here on Lemmy/PieFed/MBin kinda stabilized(?). I also think there’s been a slight uptake in content and discussion. Feels to me we’ve become more active over the years. But judging by the numbers, I’d say it’s because we lost the new users and lurkers. And these days our average userbase shifted to people who (on average) post more. But we didn’t grow as in: there’s more people around than it used to be.
Like I said, it’s a perception of mine. But if total numbers are stagnated, it may be worth for people to try to bring others in, like by direct invite (do keep explanation when inviting simple though!), or by simply attaching your fediverse profile/profiles to your other social medias where possible.