You are not comparing like for like.

Twitter is pretty much 20 years old, so are Facebook, Reddit and YouTube.

In addition, they were essentially first of a kind in their niche.

The fediverse is not even a teenager and the growth spurt hasn't set in and may never. In addition, the fediverse is utilitarian by comparison, not much beyond proof of concept. Apps, platforms and instances are fragile and evolving.

Basic things mostly work, but it's not "cool" enough to tempt organisations to join, media companies, etc.

We barely agree on how things interact with each other, for example, Mastodon uses hashtags, Lemmy doesn't.

Lemmy has communities, Mastodon doesn't.

It's not that one is better than the other, it's still being worked out by the community.

You also have to remember that there have been many "failures" along the way. Geocities, MySpace, Usenet, AOL, bulletin boards and bang path addressing. The fediverse might succeed, whatever that means, or it might not.

I'm a user on Mastodon, Lemmy and Bluesky, they're evolving day by day. I'm not sure if I could tell you what I like or dislike about each, they're just different.

Other people have said some things, but I'll say some things too:

1. I think it's easy to look at the titans of success and assume it was inevitable, but in the middle were lots of corporate failures. Google failed to beat Facebook with Google Plus, MySpace was massive and is now basically dead, Vine started up and died, Vimeo failed to defeat YouTube, and while I can't quote their names there were other "Facebook but...", "Twitter but...", and "YouTube but .." companies out there that sprung up with VC backing and died irrelevant. Meta currently has threads as an attempt to compete with Twitter, and probably that'll be gone and forgotten soon. So in a sense the fediverse is beating MySpace and Threads and Vine and GooglePlus by having an alternative that's running at all. Not all victories are assured simply by existing or being "better"

2. A lot of it is Network Effects. People go on PeerTube, there's nothing they want to watch, they leave. Twitter has been around in the tech space for like 20 years, because other tech people at the same conference as you were on it, but most normal people weren't on it until celebrities started signing up. Because otherwise they'd show up on the home page, not see anything they cared about, and then leave. Most platforms these days explicitly prevent interoperability, and the law allows them to, so it's hard to migrate slowly.

3. The fediverse is explicitly anti-control and anti-centralization. This means it's aggressively and purposely fragmented, which normal people don't care about, but does bring a host of UX problems. Any attempt to paper over these will likely be met with hostility by the existing community and projects, because the solutions to these "problems" tend to involve central authority of some kind or another, and with centralization comes power, control, and attack vectors

4. The fediverse, similar to above, is pretty anti-profit. That's why it's an alternative to the big popular ones, but it also means it's harder to have solid paid maintainers and disk storage and stuff, compared to something like YouTube or Facebook which are among the most valuable companies on this Earth. It also makes it hard to buy ads, or airtime, or grassroots astroturfing, or celebrity endorsements, etc, which might reach a broader audience and draw people in. That all takes money that the fediverse simply doesn't have.

5. The fediverse is pretty anti-algorithm, or at least the way the other platforms characterize "The Algorithm" which is to say anti-dark-patterns. We do this both because we are care about our own health as people, so if we're running something for ourselves why would we dark-pattern ourselves, but also because we aren't driven by profit motive, and so usership costs money and gains us kinda nothing, so there's no incentive to "addict" our users. I've seen multiple accounts, and also seen first-hand, people join Pixelfed from Instagram and bounce off pretty quick. And it's not just the network effect, it's also that Instagram and its algorithmic feed is constantly trying to trick you into watching more and more and more. Pixelfed says "what do you want to see?" and the user goes... uh... I don't know. Maybe cats? And Pixelfed says "okay, here's some cats and nothing else. Let me know if there's anything else you want, otherwise bye thanks for coming". Like, people want a firehose of attention, but the platform doesn't want to subject you to that, and doesn't benefit from it, so it goes "that's all I have for you now. Come back later" which other social media never will.

That last one I think is really a big part of it. You have to ask "Why are so many people on Twitter? What do they do there?" and then wonder if them doing that on Mastodon is better? It's obviously philosophically better for them to spend their time on a freedom-respecting platform than a for-profit exploitation machine, but they could also use neither and that would probably be better too. They could go to a library, a cafe, and a park. Is Mastodon essential? Why do you want it to be used by millions and millions of people? What do you get out of it? What does Mastodon get out of it? What do the maintainers of the instances get out of it?

Would the world be a better place if all Twitter users were Mastodon users, or if all Twitter users simply didn't use either?

Also, people today have a Facebook account, and a Twitter account, and a YouTube account, and a Reddit account, and each of those services does a different thing. You mention how there's no events built into Mastodon. Sure, but there's no events built into Twitter, Reddit, or YouTube either. There's no marketplace integration into frendica, but there's no marketplace integration in YouTube either, Reddit doesn't have hashtags, Facebook doesn't have playlists of videos, Twitter doesn't tell you people's birthdays, etc.

Just because different fediverse tools use ActivityPub, it doesn't necessarily mean they all must interoperate. It can be neat sometimes, and sometimes it basically happens by accident, but a lot of the time it just doesn't make sense.

People don't leave platforms until their discomfort outweighes whatever they want from the platform. Things have been on the slow slide to enshittification for more than a decade now. AI is kind of raising the stakes a bit and increasing the rate at which things get endhittified, but you'll note that most people don't leave because of that. They find ways to circumvent it. We have seen this with Google Chrome, Firefox, DuckDuckGo etc.

People don't like change. They get comfortable with a platform and they stick around there until it's completely untenable. The easier it is to insulate yourself in that platform from things you don't want to see, the more likely people are to stick around. This is why so many people tried to block Elon Musk's account on Xitter, instead of leaving. It's why they block communities like r/thedonald on reddit. It's why Tumblr is currently having a whole shit fit about the exclusion of trans flags from their little icon fest thing for pride month, and doxing themselves/other ban evading accounts in the process.

When they do leave, they don't often try to get others to leave with them. They ghost the platform and move on. Sometimes that means going somewhere else. Sometimes it means filling that hole with a different kind of platform entirely.

The alternatives do exist and the 0.1% of people that want to use them, are. If more people want to use the fediverse in future thats great, but I don't want to just get people lumped under a particular umbrella because it's what I personally want. The fediverse doesn't need to be the biggest social media platform for me to feel validated.

The fediverse is a tool. I don't choose what tool to use based on what everyone's favourite tool is. I base it on the job at hand

The problem with any social platform is that people tend to go where their friends and family are at. Add to that that most people will just have one account for anything. Like when people have their Facebook account, they're not going to take the 5 minutes to open up a friendica account, if they even know that exists to begin with.

Ways forward?

Don't fuck up and let meta/Google/apple/reddit/etc fuck up more nad more, making people leave and search for alternatives

Find a billionaire friendly to the cause and willing to invest in development and marketing

Keep evangelizing friends and family, but hell, even some close friends that are nerd developers are still on Reddit for some messed up reason.

If someone is looking for a place that has “everyone” then the fediverse is not going to be the place for them.

The important part is that there is enough people here that the network is healthy. Overpopulation is as bad for the network as underpopulation.

If someone is looking to connect with their relatives and close friends… Call them! Send some pics in the group chat. Shoot them a text and ask how they’ve been. The best part of getting off corporate “social” media is actually getting to socialize with your contacts again!

One issue is that there isn't much content outside a specific topic (open source and American politics). The biggest reason why people use social media is to socialise, and not to show off how much of an open source advocate they are. To people who aren't interested in that, this site is pretty much a downgrade. Defederation hurts content discoverability. Instances potentially shutting down is a risk.

Most of fediverse creators do not even bother with marketing. Those who does rely too much on slogans rather then concrete advantages and promotion of features. The fediverse do not even have to compete with mainstream social media

A few points:

1. MAU is a problematic indicator for the fediverse. for example misskey does not report it properly (see the github), for some open source platforms like lemmy the definition of active users is too strict IMO (i would count anyone that logged in, but that is a different discussion).

2. if you look at the growth rate of servers it is pretty good i would argue. i calculated a around 30 percent annual growth in the last few years. if this was a stock or a ETF or a pension fund this would be considered a very good growth rate IMO.

3. generalizing about the fediverse is not very useful IMO. look at specific software. when i thought of things i thought could be good for lemmy i submitted issues and things got implemented. if i can do it a lot of other people can. feedback is important.

4. you are asking people who are already satisfied with the fediverse platform they are using. which could be useful but i think you should be asking people who are not using it. find accounts you like that make you or others stay on proprietary platforms. that you think provide high quality content and ask them what they want. or even have a discussion about what features to design or experiment with. for example i saw people on r/newiran (subreddit for the opposition in iran) wanting a feature to show from which country someone posts in (like what twitter recently added). this can even just be a unofficial plugin people can install. these kind of things could provide a competitive advantage that will help people use the fediverse on top of what they want or need in proprietary platforms.

still sad over .ee vanishing it had a large enough base, where there was more community and different topics then now, people decided to scatter to different even less known platforms, and wonder why it isnt growing. too spread out. the problem is some people on lemmy decided to keep changing platforms , and get less and less intereactions overall. also i suspect people largely went back to REDDIT.

I recently had to use Instagram and it's actually has an awful UX. Looks like peoples just too used to it.

Personally, I don't really give a shit about how many users there are on the various Fediverse platforms I use.

As Mastodon is the one that gets 90% of my use, I'll talk about that in particular.

I've been a regular Mastodon user since the great influx of late 2022. In those 3.5 years I've somehow managed to convince more people to follow me than I ever did in 15 years of using Twitter. I follow almost 700 people, so my feed always has something new to show me. Always. I don't follow any journalists, I don't follow any 'celebrities', save for one or two comedians. At no point have I ever thought that Mastodon needs more users, because - for me at least - it's plenty busy enough, and does what I need it to do. It lets me interact with regular people talking about their regular lives and regular interests, and that's wonderful to me.

I'm at a point where I don't really care to understand why a platform must be the number one most popular, if what it already is is sufficient.

That said, it would be useful if more official resources had a presence on there. Local councils, government departments, etc... And companies who appear to have offloaded most of their customer service to social media, but stopped at X and Facebook.

The one thing I've never really understood is why that sort of thing has yet to take off. News outlets, for example, could spin up a server on their own official domain, and provide accounts to employees. So someone posting from a @news.bbc.com instance could, at a glance, be understood to be a genuine BBC reporter.

However, personally I avoid news like the plague these days, so for me that's neither here nor there.

Why do I care about popularity? I don’t want to be on mega platforms and I don’t understand why that’s the bar. As long as a platform is generally self sustaining or very slow growing that’s plenty good.

I think the p2p self hosting community will be the foundation of alternatives that inherently have significant inversion of control

True p2p apps, while still dependent on some infrastructure, offer the promise of total self control and administration. Again to function at scale and even safely tools to enable communication and collaborative administration will be needed, but you will have ultimate control on your data and the data of others

Never in my life has a really enjoyable place also been the place where everyone hangs out. If all those people show up here it's dead.

Ideally, this place should be no more than 1% the size of those others, but that's only if the numbers for both groups are actual people. With the amount of bots on those other sites, 10 bots per user isn't crazy at all. I'd say 0.1% might be about right here.

So there seems to be people who want the fediverse to grow a lot and surpass corpo social media and become the dominant thing. I get that. For myself I experience the time when the internet was all command line and most of the users were in universities or army bases. Home users were more likely to be on prodigy than aol. One thing I like about the fediverse is its niche community of gnu/libre type folks. The other is the control I have to block domains, instances, community, and users. so if it becomes dominant I can still keep it the way I want it. Anyway I don't think many fediverse folks are especially concerned about it growing and some like myself and a little more negative about it. Not really negative but I think ambivalent is the best word for it.

I am building some solutions to these problems myself

No need to be coy. What problems are you tackling? Where is the code? I agree with pretty much of what you are saying, this is why I started working on Fediverser, how about joining forces instead of coming with yet-another plan all on your own?

I don't care if lemmy is a platform that everyone wants to use. I care that it's a platform I want to use.

It’s certainly not from a lack of user interest. Search terms like “facebook alternatives” have absolutely skyrocketed to unprecedented levels in the last couple years

Your certainty will be the mistake here. What does "skyrocketed" mean? From 10 search requests to 100? J/K. But: Is it more than the 1% of users? I doubt it. Most people are not interested at all in stuff like this. They go where everybody is, simple as that.

So go figure:

I mean, sure, you can chase MAU numbers all you want (please don't). The reality is that people are too lazy, busy, or overwhelmed to invest even two minutes' thought/effort (for many people those are the same thing) into trying alternatives. And that's okay - it's going to have to be, because it's not going to change. And if it did, then that type of person would be all up in your federated network.

Personally, if 25 million normies joined microblogging fedi, I'd probably leave. I like microblogging fedi small & weird. The vibe on Bluesky is rancid as fuck and that's where a lot of the normies went when Twitter got rebranded as a Nazi bar. Anyway, microblogging fedi is thriving based on the metric I care about, namely interesting conversations and interesting stuff to look at and people engaging with my project accounts.

But if you want to talk the whys and wherefores - the Mastodon "dev process" is the single biggest impediment to Mastodon being, you know, good. And that's a direct outgrowth of the mentality of the people who run it. Could I elaborate? Maybe. But (regardless of what my account info says) I've been on fedi more than 10 years, and I'll just say, you'll have to look into that yourself. Mastodon is not good software, and it's not going to become good software. And many if not most of the other microblogging fedi platform apps are just not trying to have mass appeal. It's not a goal of those projects. If you want it to be, you'll probably have to fork one or build one from scratch.

I hear there are similar issues with Lemmy and with Piefed. Personally, I'm posting from a Lemmy account, but I'll be taking a much closer look at Piefed when I get my shit together to set up my own node. I don't know if Piefed is trying for mass appeal or not, but even if the devs are, the federated nature of the threadiverse is by definition going to make it conceptually a bit harder to engage with, because there is necessarily going to be 15 communities for every topic, and that's by design and working as intended. Federated social media was never going to be as "easy" to use as centralized megacorp social media, and will never be, and that's by design, and that's okay. It's going to have to be, or you'll need to switch to a centralized model.

I'm happy with the current rate of progress. As it is, I easily spend way more time than I probably should talking to people here almost exclusively about a very niche topic. I don't need this place to be a be-all, end-all. I just come here to have nice conversations with whoever is around.

99% of atoms in existence are Hydrogen and Helium. And yet here we are.

You can't have both. The platforms are not inherently evil, it's the money people/corpos that run them. None of them started that way, they were all projects started by small groups, and were even fun/useful at first. Scale -> corpo attention -> buyout -> slop. That's the cycle. It won't change. You can enjoy the smaller shit until it either dies because it can't be sustained, or is bought out by Monty Burns and he only knows one way to live. Either way, you'll then have to move on to whatever the current new is if you want out.

I like the fediverse specifically because the lack of normies

I don't think the Fediverse will surpass mainstream social media by any means. I genuinely don't believe there will be a day where any Fediverse platform will reach even a tenth of the userbase of its mainstream counterpart.

The current trend of Fediverse platforms seems to operate in this way: "make X ActivityPub compatible" where X is any existing or emerging mainstream platform. A good example is Loops which, I feel is completely disconnected from the TikTok userbase that it attempts to capture. TikTok is very popular precisely because of its addictive algorithm and I'm not sure if the ethics of Loops will follow in that direction.

Although the Fediverse population is small, I think it's pretty resilient at least. We're all here because of a shared ideal of "social media" that isn't owned by a single entity. Unless users outside the Fediverse share the same ideal, it is unlikely they'll stick around.

The three problems listed on your post have pretty much been the same for the past three years and I don't think anyone has made a good solution for it (otherwise, it would have blown up by now). There are so many suggestions like making a quiz or choosing a random instance but we all know those come with their own flaws. I don't know how many years it will take for us to solve this problem but I'm always happy to see new attempts at solving them. The funny thing though is that some of these solutions rely on centralization...

However, in my opinion, I think we are approaching the Fediverse wrong. The current expectation is it to eventually replace mainstream social media (it won't). There is an obsession with a grand narrative or even a utopia.

In my opinion, the "new" problem of the Fediverse should be this:

"How do you build a platform with decentralization first in mind?"

If we start thinking about this question, then problems like "choosing a server" should be irrelevant. I think about this question almost every day and I'm always on the look out for new platforms (both Fediverse and non-Fediverse) that hopefully aren't just "X but ActivityPub". I hope there will be more effort put into developing a platform where choosing an instance isn't thought to be a hindrance but is actually part of the experience. A platform where we aren't actively trying to "hide" decentralization.

The question might sound stupid for some but just try to think about how we're always chasing after mainstream social media and never really coming up with something original and unique where features are designed around decentralized interactions first.

I don't have the answers to this problem but I hope we can change the way we think about the Fediverse.