The Bluesky surge happened after a massive global election result and a massive grievance from progressives/leftists over Musk and how Twitter has become
Why didn't they go to Mastodon? (hint: some of them did in 2022)
If Reddit fucks up, as a reaction - Lemmy would get many new users.
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?
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.
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?
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.
When do you think Bluesky started?
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).
The people behind it were several orders of magnitude more well known.
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.
Me and most others
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.
Network effects are incredibly strong
Yet, Bluesky has grown to 35M+ active accounts, even though they started way after us
We have the advantage that we’re not growth focused
This is not an "advantage". This is an excuse we tell ourselves to cope with our failures.
The inevitable enshittification will do its job eventually,
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.
Who is going to pay for those ads? With what money? There is no single entity here with enough interest in growing the Fediverse, and any grassroots movements that we do have are strictly against commerce.
The Lemmy devs would be making more money if they went to work for Uber Eats than as software developers, and I barely manage to convince people to pay $2.50/month to offer a professional hosting service.
We don't really need to "buy ads" to grow. We just need to get more people willing to invest in it.
Yeap, 100%. The extremists and the terminally online are overrepresented here, and that keeps the masses away.
I'd suggest though to not waste your time arguing with the self-righteous idiots and just focus on bringing more normie-friendly content.
I've spent the a good part of last year working on Fediverser. The tools to lower the barrier of migration and to get people out of Reddit were built. To me, it feels like it's the users and admins here that were not interested in pushing that as a goal.
Isn't it a little bit sad to think that the best we can do here is to wait for everyone else to get pissed at Big Tech's fuckups?
I think this is a fine attitude if you are an user who just wants to enjoy a "slow web" kind of experience, but as someone aware of all the ill effects of Big Tech and Surveillance Capitalism, I wish we were more ambituous and aimed for a bigger slice of user share.