ok, that’s a fair point. But then this whole talk about “going vertical” and “exponential growth” is useless, and the only thing that we could (perhaps) try to take out of these mass migration events is to ask ourselves “would we able to reduce churn in the Fediverse without compromising on any principles?”

In other worlds, does this mean that the only reason that the Fediverse is small is because it is not as addictive as the other social networks? Does this mean that leaving Instagram and coming to PixelFed is the same as quitting unhealthy ultraprocessed foods and realizing that when you switch to a healthy diet you simply don’t eat as much at all?

And if any of this is true, shouldn´t we change the effort from “leave Instagram and come to PixelFed” to “Leave Instagram and quit all social media”?

It’s not “again” for anything you’ve written in this comment thread.

Try the sibling: https://communick.news/comment/4203442

If it’s indeed a trend for Lemmy to have 200% yoy growth then yeah, I’d think that’d be pretty successful.

You got it exactly backwards. There is a decline trend (monthly users go down month after after a spike) while the “200% growth” is not determined by any curve and can not be measured by any specific interval, because it was driven by one stochastic event that brought 100k people out of a sudden (the Reddit migration)

To go back to my original comment: let’s see how the numbers are going to be in the next month. If the first derivative is still positive, then we can talk about “trends”, until then we are just senseless cheering and extrapolating out of one data point.

Again: “back to baseline” is not meant in absolute numbers, but trend-wise.

I’m sorry, I think I was looking at overall numbers and not just Mastodon. According to https://mastodon.fediverse.observer/stats&months=48, it seems Mastodon was at ~575k MAU before Musk, shot up to ~1.5M early 2023 and is now sitting around 800k.

I don’t mean that the numbers went exactly back where they were. I mean that every spike was followed by a steady decline.

Compare it with Bluesky now, or compare it with Reddit during Digg’s meltdown. Their growth curves will look like an S-curve, not this series of discrete jumps followed by 40-60% loss.

At first, it was only an app for PixelFed. But AFAIK, the developer got tired of waiting Daniel to implement some needed improvements on PixelFed’s API and decided to create his own backend.

Oh, wow, very impressive! Did you have to use a calculator to get to this challenging result?

Communick’s revenue grew 1800% in 2024, compared to 2023. Do you think that makes it successful in any way?

I am here since before the Reddit backout and I am on Mastodon since 2018. Lemmy was at 15k MAU, went up to over 125k and now is 1/3 of that. Mastodon had 1M 575k something before Elon, hit up close to 2M 1.5M and now is sitting around 800k. (edit: I was looking at the overall charts and used wrong figures. Corrected now.)

Sure, if your reference point is waaaay before the spikes then what we have now seem “a lot”. However, my point is that these spikes are far from being indicative of mass adoption.

Lemmy had the same jump in numbers during the Reddit Exodus. Mastodon had a huge boost when Elon bought Twitter.

Every spike has been a followed by a slide back to baseline in less than a couple of months. After you’ve seen it happen so many times, it is no longer interesting.

https://xkcd.com/605/

Lies, damn lies, and graphs that don’t have the Y-axis starting at 0.

10% growth in a day is nice, but far from a revolution. Let’s see this trend going for a month.

It’s not possible with the current approach of server-centric ActivityPub software. In theory, you can have one ActivityPub account to interact with all the other services, but in practice what happens is that the different server creates a new one internally and does not give you access to the private key.

You are right about the code , but you are also making my point about why it matters if the whole endeavor is classified as for-profit or not.

The problem is not with the federated model, per se. Matrix is federated and it has 100M+ users.

The problem is a cultural one: Mastodon promoted federation along the idea that instances should be aligned with its member’s identity. It’s a mistake of their own doing, which was reflected on their own UX and marketing copy for a long time.

You are confusing cause and effect and you are making a pointless distinction.

If all it took to qualify as a non-profit was to eliminate profit redistribution, we would have every sole proprietorship or small LLC entity turning itself to a 503, and then distributing its excess profit as salaries.

The software needs to be able to compete with Bluesky and right now it quite simply does not.

Mastodon has a 5 year headstart over Bluesky. Bluesky has more users, large players already getting into it and is raising money and is not ashamed to to be actively looking for a business model.

Meanwhile, Mastodon completely blew the opportunity it got when Musk bought Twitter and keeps repeating the same mistake of preaching to the converted.

What makes you think that more money would solve it? Their problem is not a lack of money, but a lack of ambition.

but unless you’re going to point to particular issues you have with Mastodon’s then, again, I fail to see the relevance.

The “particular issues” I have with Mastodon (or rather, with its leadership) are rooted in its cultural values.

I think that presenting itself as the saviors of civil online discourse is ineffective. It sounds good for this tiny majority that is already here, but does nothing to bring the masses that are still stuck inside the walled gardens of Big Tech.

1. The money wasn’t donated yet. This is their stated goal.

2. Yes, I am saying that we would be better off by having this money put somewhere else.

I wouldn’t try to run a social media company with less than that.

Then don’t make a “social media company”. Change the game.

The goal is not to “compete” with social media companies. The goal is to build tools and digital infrastructure that can let people communicate with each other (a) cheaply, (b) without intermediaries and © with robust protections against malicious actors of varying scale.

Give me 5 million euros and one single year, and I can definitely build it. Fuck, give me half a million and I’ll do it.

Surprised to see you of all people question why a project needs money to pay for things

I am not questioning the need for money. I am questioning the amount.

And yes, the reason I am asking this is precisely because I don’t believe the “not-for-profit” leads to better outcomes than any for-profit one, and I do not share the belief that all for-profit endeavors are bad.

To illustrate the point: I’d take good old Craigslist making more than $600 million per year as a tool against Big Tech and unethical corporations than any of these feel-good initiatives from Mastodon.