npub1s30ww

1w ago

Until someone creates a completely novel app idea that utilizes the Fediverse, the growth of the Fediverse will remain asynchronous and depend largely on being an alternative to bigger walled-garden social networks.

What do I mean by that? Let’s look at the apps on the Fediverse right now, the ones with traction. Mastodon is an alternative to Twitter. Lemmy is an alternative to Reddit. PixelFed—love it, been talking about it all day—is an alternative to Instagram. PeerTube is an alternative to YouTube.

I love these apps. I think they’re fantastic. But here’s the truth: growth on the Fediverse is asynchronous because it depends on dissatisfaction with bigger walled-garden apps. People come to Mastodon when they’re pissed off at Twitter. This has been less and less true over the past two years, though, because that pissed-off user base has been moving to Threads and Bluesky instead. That’s just how it goes.

About a year ago, Reddit pissed off a lot of people, so there was a movement toward Lemmy. Right now, a lot of people are pissed off at Mark Zuckerberg and everything Meta-related, so Instagram users are looking for alternatives. Typically, they would end up on Lemon8, ByteDance’s Instagram alternative. But here’s the problem: TikTok and, by extension, Lemon8, are on the verge of being banned by the U.S. government. That’s happening this week. They’re pulling the plug.

So when you look at all the apps, you realize there isn’t really an Instagram alternative right now—except PixelFed.

Now, I want to highlight something: a certain class of user is attracted to the Fediverse. It’s not just people who are dissatisfied. It’s people who are dissatisfied and no longer trust walled-garden software run by big corporations. They don’t trust them. These users want an alternative with an escape hatch, something that allows them to leave when things go wrong. That’s why they come to the Fediverse. They don’t want to be prisoners of walled gardens anymore. They also know that if they do end up trapped, they want the exit to be as easy as possible.

When these spikes in registrations happen, they follow a trend. There’s a big rush of enthusiasm, and then it abates. A lot of people return to the bigger app. Why? Because, as much as they might hate the walled garden, they love their social graph. If you have a million followers on Instagram, it’s nearly impossible to give that up and start from scratch. Those metrics, engagements, and the dopamine hit when the numbers go up—those are hard to leave behind.

There’s another reason people go back to the walled gardens: the lack of feed algorithms on the Fediverse. For the past decade, people have been trained to write posts for algorithms, not for humans. Posting for an algorithm is a skill, almost like SEO. You phrase things in a way that gets picked up by the algorithm. That’s a skill you can’t use on the Fediverse because it doesn’t exist—or, when it does, it’s decentralized. I’ve seen feed algorithms on clients, but not servers. So people return to the walled gardens because they’re more comfortable there.

But here’s the thing: a certain percentage of users—maybe 25%—stick around. These are the ones who figure out how the Fediverse works. It takes them time to adjust and develop a new mental map, but they stay and become true believers. And that’s how the Fediverse grows: through this asynchronous, dissatisfaction-driven process, pulling users away from the Instagrams, Pinterests, Facebooks, TikToks, and whatever else.

I think this asynchronous growth will always happen. It’s just the nature of big social platforms—they’ll always piss people off. Every time Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk screws up, people will come to the Fediverse. But at some point, I hope someone makes a completely unique social media app that’s ActivityPub-enabled—something we’ve never even considered, with a use case no one’s thought of yet.

There are still plenty of opportunities for innovation. The Fediverse gives you so much freedom to develop an app quickly because you don’t have to build the social graph from scratch—it’s already there. At some point, someone’s going to create something truly novel, and when that happens, the Fediverse will finally grow in a non-asynchronous, sustained way.

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