I think that slow and steady growth is actually a positive. I'd argue that the key part to focus on right now is sustainability. This involves having enough devs to work on the platforms, enough people who are willing to host them, and enough users to produce content. Once these three criteria are met, then the platform will stick around indefinitely. This is a very different dynamic from commercial platforms that need to find ways to monetize and grow to stay viable.

Mastodon now has millions of users, and now there are a bunch of other compatible platforms like Pleroma that all work on the same protocol and interop with each other. It's very much in the real of being indefinitely sustainable in my opinion. Even Lemmy with hundreds of thousands of users has likely passed the threshold at this point. So, I'm not too worried about rapid growth as an aspect of viability for the fediverse.

Meanwhile, the slow trickle of users means that new people end up adapting to the existing culture, and this is an important feature in my opinion. When you have a stampede of people come in from the mainstream, they bring the mainstream culture along with them and their views become dominant. We already saw this happening to an extent on the popular Lemmy instances after the Reddit migration.

I expect that we'll continue seeing more and more incidents happening on commercial platforms as they crackdown on political speech, and we'll be seeing more and more waves of people join the fediverse. And the bigger fediverse gets the more attractive it becomes since there's increasingly more content available.

TLDR here is that we shouldn't worry too much about rapid growth, and instead focus on making sure things are sustainable. The growth will happen organically over time.

For sure, there needs to be a conscious political effort to promote sound ideas. Simply having open source platforms doesn't magically solve that problem, but it is a prerequisite for having a voice. It's also worth noting that decentralization is perfectly compatible with principled organizing. The key is to work on building a common set of ideas and understanding across the network that's grounded in sound theory.

If only he took your advice. More lives would be improved worldwide as a result.

I got permabanned from pre-Elon Twitter for saying Donald Trump Junior should live up to JFK Junior's legacy and get in a small plane.

Yet people still tell me that Twitter was a leftist cesspool before Elon bought it.

When life rewards you for your good actions 🙏

I was addicted Reddit. I left after the gzd purge, and looking back it’s not at all appealing.

Yeah, thats why I don’t tell anyone even though I really want to…