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.
User numbers are a basic health metric of any platform. Sociology and economics are very related to the practical functionality of a platform. If users find it too tedious or confusing to use, they won’t use it. If they don’t get good or consistent performance due to poorly optimized infrastructure, them they will not stick around.
I am not saying to use others as models. I am saying that there are basic functionalities that don’t exist in a fully formed way on the fediverse, like private messages or events. This is not some novel concept that Facebook invented but they have done it in a clean and polished way that users appreciate. When they try alternatives on the fediverse, the difference is jarring. That is the discussion I am hoping to have here, not about some theoretical end state of social media platforms operating within a capitalist system that may or may not be based in data or fact.
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.
The fact that the fediverse is young and evolving is what excites me about it. There is tremendous potential, we just have to realize it.
Also, I will mention that part of why Facebook took off like it did, initially, was the ability to import friends from Myspace. This is much more complex and nearly impossible to do today, but I really think we need to look at social graph imports for the fediverse, to allow people a life raft from closed wall platforms. The failures of the past were not an accident, they were carefully planned out by other entities who did things better.
You’re turning a practical functionality discussion into a philosophical debate. I am asking “how can we make the fediverse better and realize it’s true potential”, and your response is “why bother, it’s gonna get enshittified anyway?”. How is that a productive or useful conversation to have?
I am not suggesting to impose any standards on anyway. Thus why I made a post about it to spark discussion, rather than making some declaration one way or another. It needs to be collaborative and democratic, like the rest of the fediverse.
I am building alternatives, as I said in my post. I just thought I would put it out there for discussion to see what others think. Dismissing the conversation and refusing to engage with the actual points on the weaknesses of the fediverse in its current form is not productive, imo. I respect your opinion, and I’m glad you enjoy how it is now. Based on the numbers though, that is not universally the case.
I am not suggesting we take the same path to get to tech behemoth size. I am not evening saying that reaching tech behemoth size is a good thing or something to strive for. But could we at least try to register on the scale at all, and could we do that in a way that sticks to a set of morals and ethics from the ground up of the platforms architecture? It’s one thing to say “enjoy the platform for what it is”, it’s another to say “what it is is what it always will be” or even what it should be. It is far from what it should be imo, which is the whole point of the post.
Are you saying that none of the points about the current structure of the fediverse are valid? That we should not try to have more streamlined and functional platforms for users to migrate to? The fact that these platforms are hard to market by their very nature would seem to be even more of an argument for a more fully featured and frictionless experience, would it not?
How do your friends and family use it? Have the figured out how to use events or groups at all?
It’s almost too many to list, but off the top of my head:
I also have an idea of how I think the platform should work at a fundamental level that is different from how friendica approaches things.
I have tried friendica. It is extremely mediocre. It has only 5000 monthly active users for a reason.
The Google trends I have seen are far more than 0.1% of people out there. I know many people personally who would love to leave Facebook, but there is no good alternative, and the issues I mentioned above are contributing factors. We can keep sticking our head in the sand and saying that it is what it is, and the fediverse will never grow because no one wants it, or we can try to understand why users are not being retained and seek to address those issues. It’s less about validation and more about providing real alternatives for people. I kind of thought that was what this whole thing was about.
That is a pretty defeatist attitude. It’s also not really based on any data or facts. What evidence do you have that small social media will inevitably be bought up and enshittified when they become popular? Especially ones run on open source software and run by communities and non-profits. I’m not saying we should change how the fediverse is run at a fundamental level, but we need to be honest about the limitations and work to address them. Is that not something we should be striving to do?
What I am building is more of a Facebook competitor than an Instagram competitor. If all you need is an Instagram like platform, then pixelfed should be fine.
I am working on a new platform that allows import from facebook/instagram. This is a hard technical problem for the fediverse because you have to balance importing with not spamming everyone with those imports. It is an important feature though, and it’s rather shocking that little to no fediverse platforms are utilizing the GDPR exports to their advantage.
I am definitely looking for platforms that exist and seeing what can be built off of, but from what I can tell, it needs more work than is within the scope of existing platforms. The two primary problems I am working on are 1. Unifying the fediverse functionalities in one place and one clean UI, i.e. microblogs, forum, events, marketplace, etc, and 2. Importing your social graph from any platform, Facebook, Instagram, threads, x, mastodon, bluesky, Lemmy, etc, and recombining it into a single feed as much as possible using activitypub, at protocol, oauth, webscraping, and rss feeds. I am happy to team up with anyone interested, and I will definitely take a look at what you are working on.