this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
1989 points (95.0% liked)

Fediverse

28490 readers
437 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

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

The mastodon and lemmy content I’m seeing feels like 90% of it comes from people who are:

  • ~30 years old or older

  • tech enthusiasts/workers

  • linux users

There’s nothing wrong with that particular demographic or anything, but it doesn’t feel like a win to me if the entire fediverse is just one big monoculture.

I wonder what it is that is keeping more diverse users away? Is picking a server/federation too complicated? Or is it that they don’t see any content that they like?

Thoughts?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

sure. but i also can't help but feel like when history looks back on the fediverse it's more likely to be in the geocities and anglefire category than some seismic shift in social media.

I hope for the later, but realistically feel it will be the former.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Eh, idk about that. Matrix has been around for a few years now, and I don't think it's going anywhere. Now, is it likely to ever be as big as Twitter/Facebook/reddit? Probably not. But, I'm not sure that was ever really the goal either.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It doesn't have to be a seismic shift. Geocities and Angelfire (still around. BTW) were corporate, they needed to make money, and when the free web hosting somehow failed to make money, the corporate owners shut them down.

The Fediverse is decentralized. It doesn't have to get huge, or make a lot of money. It can carry on for as long as it has enough users to carry on. Heck, the biggest BBS that I used back in the day had 23 phone lines. Several hundred regular users, but only 23 could connect at a time. It even survived a few years into the Internet era.

That is to say that Lemmings don't have to 'win' some sort of imaginary competition by taking all of the users from the other site. People used and enjoyed those bygone systems while they lasted, and we can do the same.