this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2025
975 points (99.0% liked)
Fediverse
31086 readers
1203 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I feel like this is comparing the mall to the park.
They both attract people, but not always the same people, or for the same reasons. And that's OK.
I get what you're saying though, because I've felt this way when trying to come up with reasons for people (sole proprietors) to get with the fedi, but maybe this place is just not for influencers - not like the corp platforms, anyway. I think the fediverse will attract more and more people with its network effects, but probably never all of the people all of the time.
My modest hope is that the fedi bleeds the big platforms just enough to put them in their place and keep from enshittifying to infinity.
The things people need to build a livelihood on a platform are quality of life features. In a lot of cases, I think it's small stuff: being able to reward patrons with a tag on a specific community; automatically highlighting popular posts; making it easy to find a user's monetization page; etc.
At the moment, Lemmy is an ad-free version of Reddit missing some community and notification features. There are good political reasons to be here, but that hasn't driven a sustained increase in users.
So we won't get critical mass for network effects by being a better Reddit.
One to make the platform self-sustaining (or grow) is to give creators a reason to use the platform, which will give people a reason to come and stay.
It's not just ad-free, it's actively anti-corporate, anti-advertising, even anti-monetization. I would go so far as to say even anti-content in some ways. That's a cultural disconnect that goes beyond tooling.
There are upvoted positive posts and comments about
the Switch 2 announcement (but not Nintendo's legal policy),
the Framework advertising event last week,
Valve/Steam/SteamOS/Steamdeck/Gabe Newell in general,
Costco in general,
EVs in general (excluding Tesla and Cybertrucks 😂),
podcasts that solicit funding and carry advertising,
anime and anime adjacent products,
Lenovo's laptops,
individuals selling stuff on Redbubble/Etsy/OnlyFans,
subscription razor blade delivery (not from Amazon),
and "voting with your wallet".
It'd be cool if the platform made it easier for orgs to build and interact with a following here. Niches of users really like talking about them. That doesn't mean ads, it means features that would benefit regular users as well.
That's people just sharing their opinion freely. Word of mouth chatter is definitely not the same as advertising or even influencing, though of course they try to be.