Even if Mastodon and other Fediverse platform gains are 1% of the gains of BlueSky or anything else, it’s still cause for celebration and to welcome new friendly faces with open arms.
When the Reddit API-calypse happened, I don’t think anyone expected Lemmy to have more users than Reddit or anywhere even close to a similar number. But Lemmy.ca went from around 40 active users in April 2023 to hundreds, and then to 2k over 3 months, most people being friendly and ready for something different.
Quantity isn’t everything. There is an innumerable amount of things that could be better about Mastodon, Lemmy and other Fediverse software and sure, mass-adoption could help with niche content. However the way the Fediverse is set up, it is resistant to all the sacrifices other platforms had to make in the long run to be more profitable. Musk-boi could “buy” Mastodon, Spez could “buy” Lemmy.world and ml, and Zucker-bot could “buy” Pixelfed tomorrow, but that wouldn’t stop anyone from forking those platforms and leaving the main instances. The distributed nature makes it hard for a monopolist to capture.
The fediverse will have the same growths as most foss. It will start slow and continue to grow slowly forever. It will always be a bit behind the cutting edge but it will never get worse only get better. Its like evolution it gets forked the best fork wins the reat die repeat.
Every enshitification cycle we will gain a few people and once we have them we have they stay a lot longer than most other platforms. We will not win through mass adoption but through a long slow a painfull proccess of gradual accumulation.
And at some point it will become dominant eg blender, a bunch of standards, and linux in the server space. The tech companies live on the edge forever trying to outrun the snail that will kill them instantly when it touches them. Foss is coming it cannot be stopped it will find them and it will kill them
*if we can fund it
I’m probably going to start donating $5 a month to the Lemmy devs (or whomever is the best to donate to) Vote with your wallet people!
I would reccommend donating to ur instances over the devs. The instances have ongoing costs that if not paid will shut down the fediverse far quicker than a slowed development cycle
Ty I figured someone would point me in the right direction. On an aside, absolutely no one irl I’ve talked to has ever heard of Lemmy or the fediverse which is disappointing. I wonder how we get fediverse stuff to grow
The .world instance is very well funded - they take more money than they spend. Not profit since they’re a nonprofit, they save it as well as give to others. Meanwhile the Lemmy developers still don’t have proper full time funding. This information is public. If I were you I’d subscribe to fund the developers for now. Lemmy.ca is also well funded.
is no one calling it the X-odus and why?
I mean Elon missed the opportunity too. He could have cold Twitter spaces to spacesX but nope
The Xodus
Seriously. What the fuck TechCrunch?
I thought the name x was stupid, but now I love the idea of eXodus. If I were starting a site, that’s what I would call it.
Quick! Create an instance called Lemmy.eXodus!
I love the Fediverse and see it as the only reasonable choice. Everywhere else you must eat shit and like it.
I think I saw two or three “exodus from Twitter”, every time most of the users go back after two weeks or so.
As a Spaniard this one feels different. Mastodon never really took off, but Bluesky is going up and up with lots of media personalities, politicians, influencer and most importantly, shitposting accounts
Twitter/X should be called Twix and a tweet should be a twext.
I’m embarrassingly proud of this.
