this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
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Yet, Bluesky has grown to 35M+ active accounts, even though they started way after us
This is not an "advantage". This is an excuse we tell ourselves to cope with our failures.
And when it does, the majority of people will go the next shiny "free as in beer", VC-funded siloed platform and we are going to be just another "They don't know" meme.
Not gonna argue with you mate, I know we disagree fundamentally on what the fediverse means. Me and most others never will see eye to eye with you with your capitalist growth-focused approach.
The "most others" here is a heavily self-selected group of people who don't want to compromise on any of their values and treat any effort to grow as a threat.
All of this to say, it's fine if you say "Yes, we are small and I want it that way because if it gets any bigger we will be surrounded by people who do not uphold the same values we do". The problem is that you're arguing "We are only small because of $random_reason (network effects/evil capitalists/not enough funding/etc)", as if "being small" was determined by external factors and not something that you can control.
That's the point of disagreement. I think we can control this and we can bring more people here, but it's just that you don't want to do it if means sacrificing your ideology.
Of course I don't want to compromise my values in order to see growth of a platform that I use precisely because it aligns with my values.
When I say "compromise", I am not saying "sacrifice them completely". I am talking about in terms of Big Fedi vs Small Fedi, regardless on where on the scale you want to stay, there are trade-offs to be made.
When do you think Bluesky started? It was already a known place by many before the 2024 US election, and was founded by the ex-Twitter co-founder. The people behind it were several orders of magnitude more well known.
It was announced in 2019 as an internal Twitter project, but it became its own thing in 2021-ish. Then they spent two years reinventing a bunch of things so that they could keep Twitter's original view - i.e, a system where they could delegate all the boring/liability heavy parts to users (identity, UGC) while keeping them in control of rent-seeking toll gates (the AppView).
It takes more than money and a good contact network to build something that can attract people. Jack nowadays is pushing for Nostr, but as a product it is a lot less appealing to the masses compared to Bluesky.
I mean Bluesky had 1 million registered users in September 2023, and 3 million in February 2024. It clearly had a higher base level footprint than Lemmy has ever had.
But why are you comparing Bluesky's numbers with Lemmy's. A more apt comparison would be against the whole Fediverse. We had ~2 million people in early 2023, and we've gone down since then.
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You initially made the Bluesky comparison. And to be clear, by "Lemmy" I did mean the wider Fediverse.
In any case, Bluesky itself is also flatlining and declining anyway.
Yeah, but my point is that they were a lot more effective in capturing mindshare when it was needed, and they didn't see growth as compromise on their values like people do here.
When the next fuckup from Big Tech comes around, do you think that people will think about going to Mastodon/Lemmy/PieFed, or they will just look at Bluesky?
The Bluesky surge happened after a massive global election result and a massive grievance from progressives/leftists over Musk and how Twitter has become. Indeed, if you think lemmy is politically partisan - then Bluesky is no different.
The Reddit -> Lemmy surge happened because of some poor Reddit admin decisions. The scale of the events were on different levels.
It would depend on the site origin of the fuckup. If Reddit fucks up, as a reaction - Lemmy would get many new users.
Why didn't they go to Mastodon? (hint: some of them did in 2022)
Or perhaps there will be some other platform that is not so afraid of growth like Lemmy is, and people will go there, just like people went to Bluesky instead of going to Mastodon?
No idea.
Yeah, there might be. But it'd have to be pretty similar to Reddit. I don't know of any right now.
I don't know how you think the fediverse is somehow afraid of growth though.
People went to Mastodon and faced a number of UX issues:
Because getting content was hard, they were basically thrown into a whole new ecossytem and were greeted by the OG Mastodon users, who were not at all welcoming: , complaining about "their space" being invaded, had many displays of "opression olympics", made a point of being extra loud about their extremist views as an attempt to scare normies, demanded everyone to learn "proper manners" right away, put content warnings on anything, etc.
In other words, people didn't go to Mastodon in 2024 because those that tried in 2022 were shunned away and left with the impression that the Fediverse is not for them.
For the reasons above. It's not that they are "afraid of growth", but the general culture on the Fediverse is reactionary and averse to change. Making it more universally appealing would mean bringing different people, and this is what they are afraid of.
What changes are people afraid of? What "different people" is the Fediverse afraid of?
"Normies"? How?
What's stopping small businesses and influencers from setting up support communities to try and boost their profile?
What reporters?
Does this, by the way, not depend on the instance?
There is nothing stopping them, but there is no one here that wants them to come:
There were a number of reporters from the NYT/WSJ/CNN who set up Mastodon accounts in 2022 and were harassed on Mastodon.
Do you think that Fediverse is a good representation of the overall political spectrum?
People don't really respond well to advertisements and influencers on Reddit either, for context.
So here do you just mean "people tend to be democratic socialists/communists/anarchists"?
Oh, well I don't know enough about Peertubes success here. I don't really use that.
Oh for goodness sake. I simply don't believe that a paywalled system as you imagine could ever even approach Reddits numbers, or even Blueskys.
Not really. So? Neither are major reddit subreddits in many cases.
I feel like we are talking about different things. You seem to be more focused on Reddit vs Lemmy, and I am talking about the "Closed" social networks vs the wider Fediverse.
The comparison is not to Reddit. It's Instagram/TikTok/YouTube. Maybe you heard of those: it's a place where WNBA players making $100k/year by playing can make $20k per Instagram sponsored post.
First, lumping together all these three ideologies as one single block is a bit handwavy. Second, I am not talking about "anti-corporate". I'm talking about anti-business. If you think that the majority of people are that extreme in their political positions, I'd guess your worldview is quite skewed.
This is a strawman: I'm saying "We should not have to rely on open registration instances and hope that the admins get enough funds to keep going", which is not the same as "all instances should be paywalled".
I think if we didn't have as many open instances, we'd end up with more people self-hosting and running a server for their own friends, or we would start hearing from students asking their universities to run a server for them, or we would get hyper-localized instances where some group would pool resources to run a service for themselves, etc.
Again, it's not just about reddit. Also, it's about having places where politics are not such a proeminent part of the discussion. E.g, Threads got a lot of their initial momentum by avoiding politics and getting sports journalists to post about NBA and football.
Sorry, I'm thinking strictly in terms of Reddit vs. Lemmy/Piefed/adjacent networks because they are essentially Reddit alternatives that function the same. I don't really know much about Mastodon or other alternative networks, nor can I speak on their health - but the lemmyverse (including new piefed instances) seem to be fine overall.
If Piefed (or Lemmy) brings in effective community migration where an entire community can be lifted from one instance to another, then I am not bothered by future lemm.ee scenarios happening. Communities can become nomadic, and that's fine.
That's on people needing to do that. You don't need to convince me of that. I'm doing it with music and TV. People have to be the change they want to see. But there's not really anything anyone can do about that with regards to how the audience here interact, or how much interest they have in things outside of politics.
From Evan, co-author of ActivityPub: The Fediverse should be more like the Facebook Platform (lots of client apps using the same social graph) rather than the Apple App Store (a bunch of one-feature apps that have to bootstrap their own social network each time).
Instead of thinking "Lemmy/Piefed vs Reddit" or "Mastodon vs Bluesky vs Twitter" or "PeerTube vs Youtube", think that the Fediverse can be so much more than a poor man's version of the proprietary networks. This mentality is still rooted in the silos created by Big Tech.
First, I think that community migration implementation from PieFed has very bad implications. It is literally rewriting history.
Second, if we want to make the Fediverse something really accessible, it needs to be a lot more reliable. Yeah, when we are a few thousand people it's easy to coordinate the migration of a few dozen communities. But if we are talking about millions or billions of people, we can not afford to have constant failures. People have expectations set by the corporate networks, so the whole system needs to be as reliable as them.
I don't really care about that. If the idea of communities being effectively modular becomes an accepted standard, then no-one will blink an eye at their posts on a prior community being redirected after the fact to another instance.
We don't have constant failures though? What are you referring to here? Lemm.ee crashed out due to owner/admins burnout. That's the only major one i can think of.
I do. I care very much about identity and authenticity in the Fediverse. A server that can take posts done in one group and publish as their own is as unreliable as a server who puts fake posts impersonating a popular user.
One of the fundamental issues with the current implementations in the Fediverse is that the server owns the keys and can do anything on behalf of the user.
again, why you are talking about Lemmy only? Mastodon instances from all sizes go down every other week.
but if you want to talk threadverse only: feddit.de. The original kbin, fmhy, one for writers that I forgot the name...
Then we're at an impasse. But communities becoming completely modular and movable solves the problems you speak of. That's the answer.
Because I don't really care or know that much about Mastodon.
That's a bad, short-sighted, wrong answer. We can have decentralized identifiers. We have more than a couple FEPs that deal with portable objects correctly, and in the last FediForum there was a lot proposed strategies to allow migrations from both dead and live servers. None of them requires a server to unilaterally steal the content from another actor and pass it as their own.
People were criticizing me like hell because of the mirror bots on alien.top, but at least the bots were stealing from Reddit and they were meant to get people to migrate. This is implementation from PieFed may have good intentions, but the will lead to bad outcomes.
I don't think an admin of a server would think that if a community sets up there and operates there that they "own" it, to be honest.
Also, currently, it would only duplicate the content and change how it appears from a Piefed instance.
If you are the admin and developer of the server, you can do pretty much anything with it.
For example, now that I am working on an AP server, I can take all your posts on !television@piefed.social and mirror them on !television@metacritics.zone. I could also avoid sending notifications to you, so you'd be aware of this only if you visited the site directly. How would you feel about that?
Well currently an admin could easily intervene and stop a migration by removing the community mods, to be fair.
I mean you could just copy my posts anyway manually, if you were so inclined. There wouldn't be much I could do about it no matter how you did it.
No, no. By mirroring, I mean it is possible to make it look like you posted to the community.
I'd object and probably complain and it'd get your instance blacklisted. I'd support all community migrations being made publicly known - so you can see the timestamps and paper trail of a community.
But this isn't quite the way that community migration would work here - it's not quite the same thing. You would be attempting to give the impression I am actively contributing to a community I'm not - whereas I'm talking about moving a community from instance A to B. The community for all intents and purpose is the same.
If I posted actively to a community I do not own or moderate and they moved server and thus took my posts there with them, I wouldn't really object to that.
You see, this is why it's important to understand that how ActivityPub works and why we can not think only in terms of "Reddit, but federated".
In terms of ActivityPub, a community that mirrors posts is exactly the same as someone that "retweets" a message. You may not even have realized, but it's quite possible that your posts/comments have been replicated on mastodon. Now that they are (finally) adding support for quote-posts, this will be even more common.
What I just described to you is this "communities following communities" idea. It's not about "giving the impression" of anything, it would be openly to aggregate all content in one single place and to avoid fragmentation.
Now, like I said in the linked discussion, I think that there is a legitimate complaint about taking content from one place and just moving it around. But at least the approach I am proposing is not fabricating anything. It's Piefed's implementation that is falsifying information. In my view, what PieFed is doing is objectively worse than a "reposting actor". Just like the "private voting" feature, it is beneficial for its own users but it's bad for the overall Fediverse.
As explained by the user below
Communities growing in size is for capitalist pig dogs!
We here at the communist-iverse prefer to die slowly with brief spurts of new users when a more popular platform makes changes before they leave again
Tbf Idk what you imagine Lemmy can somehow do to entice new people
ngl same :|
For me Mastodon and Lemmy have shown that the general population have absolutely zero interest in decentalisation, they just don't care
Like a hive mind they simply go where other people are, if there are two crowds of people, one with 5 people and the other with 50, they will go to the one with 50, regardless if the 50 users are mingling with people like Musk and they hate Musk and don't want to support him in any way
Just posting that made me think, if people simply go to where people are, having lots of small servers instead of one large one is actually a turn off for most people
Better UX I think would help slightly, not easy when we have such good decentralization. Maybe PieFed will end up hooking people better?