Does it? None of my normie progressive friends are on the fediverse. The ones that tried it didn't like it.

this seems to work better on techy people who don't like thinking about politics but understand the technical details

Not weird at all; this was the case with cryptocurrency too. Otherwise qualified and intelligent people would invest in centralized scam coins because they had no understanding of economics, just tech.

It's sad but cool that it works the same way with social capital.

Technically, yes, if you squint; but, practically, no. It was designed with a prioritization of passing the information/data around to avoid any lack of missing anything (so you get a closer experience to the connectedness of Twitter than Mastodon) which means every instance hosts, basically, the entire world. Naturally, there's only going to be a few entities that can store and afford to store the entirety of the data of the network. There's no such thing as a small instance, in their protocol.

Doesn't BS have things in it's software that are hard coded to the main server, so it's not possible to make a completely independent host at the moment?

"It's the same picture."

Always has been. The only difference is what they're selling.

Wasn't there a similar promise made by Reddit at some point? I remember people referring it to often until it became just some myth ... and then at one point, people just realized it was never going to change and then it became a full blown private corporation that wanted an IPO and became a monolith that never even considered sharing anything.

Would have been nice if they went to Mastodon, but I wouldn't call them idiots. I don't use that media format, but if there isn't a lot of users there, I cant see the service being that useful to the users who do go there. It's like Lemmy struggles with niches. Not enough people, want to find something or ask someone about something, you'll hit a wall and find yourself looking for results elsewhere. Someday hopefully, but that movement from Twitter would have been a great time for activity pub to shine if it hadn't gotten skipped over

Why should they care about decentralization anyway? Isn’t number of users and ease of content discovery far more important?

Private posts is planned, but it's not trivial. Mastodon can't exactly brag about their nonintuitive technically just not broadcasted posts, where multiple implementations keep making private messages publicly discoverable due to bugs.

I do enjoy how that couch fucking fascist cunt is the most blocked person.

It's doable on Mastodon but significantly more complicated.

You need crawlers to index posts across the Fediverse (and avoid getting them blocked), personalized recommendation models per user, and you need pre-emptive caching on the user's instance for anything recommended (ideally the crawler would make a cache on behalf of each of the opted-in users' instances, but without content addressing this is a security risk). You also need to poll for edits / deletions.

Idk the wizardry required to make it work its just something i think would be cool

How do you algorithmically manipulate those 12M people with Mastodon?

The usual way, whatever that is. What would Mastodon do about it? How do you manipulate Bluesky?

BTW, Bluesky has almost 40M users.

It's the number in OP, so I ran with that. The fediverse number apparently excludes Gab and Truth Social. Makes sense, since those aren't federated with the rest, but that also shows an issue.

It only has to be compatible with Mastodon, not necessarily be an actual Mastodon instance, see Meta's threads.net.

Thanks. Yeah .world is definitely a bit too big, but it's still miles better than bluesky.