cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/48234252
With the worldwide wave of social media bans on major platforms aka digital verification, I wonder if we’ll see an influx of people to the Fediverse?
🤞🤞🤞 here is hoping <3
I’m actually afraid the opposite might actually happen.
if users (especially new potential users to the Fediverse.) find that social media requires them to id verifiy most of them will probably just either stick to a narrow smaller few of sites they know people use, or they’l obsolete themselves from the social media aspects of the internet entirely.
I actually hope the fediverse doesn’t grow too rapidly. Otherwise we will also be forced to implement age verification.
And suffer all the problems popularity brings.
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There is a middle ground between pulling up the ladder and trying to get everyone in the world on board.
Everyone who is genuinely interested is more than welcome but the fediverse is currently not equipped to handle hundreds of thousands or even millions of new users. Let the general public find their own niche and concentrate on the ones who find us on their own or through friends.
Who realistically believe millions of new users will come to the fediverse in short period of time? Mastodon is groeing around 2000 and less new users per day
Apparently people who hope that social media bans will drive a significant amount of people to the fediverse. This is how this whole thread started. To which I replied that I don’t want the fediverse to grow too rapidly. I would be very happy with slow but steady growth.
I get that but an ultra rapid growth in long term is very very unlikely to happen
Which is good. I’m just annoyed by the constant “What can we do to get all those people over here” threads that have been popping up the last few weeks because I don’t think that should even be our goal in the first place, no matter how unrealistic it is.
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I was thinking about:
Server costs, vast increase of bad actors and bots, legal scrutiny, international government narrative manipulation. Overall quality drop from LCD majority who aren’t typically early adopters of any new social platform. Stuff like that.
This is your first comment on your new account and you chose to be an asshole. Congratulations.
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Quite hard to enforce that given even with growth, it would be federated.
It might be hard to enforce for every instance but even if only 1% of instance admins get strongly worded letters threatening fines if they don’t follow the law, I guarantee you that many more will just decide that it’s not worth the risk, they close their instances and we end up with even fewer users than before.
Between server costs, moderation effort, discussions whether certain instances should be defederated, and existing legal requirements (like removal requests for copyrighted or illegal material), hosting an instance is already a thankless job and most admins do it for free. The last thing we need is uncontrolled growth that attracts lawmakers’ attention as well as users that don’t share our values and require even more moderation.
Let the fediverse grow naturally. We don’t need to shut anyone out but we shouldn’t actively advertise to the whole world either. Recruit your friends who might be interested in the content and culture we already have. Let the rest of the world find their own thing. That way, we can maybe stay under the radar for a couple more years before the problems start.
I knew that lemmy having the issue of instance identity being tied to DNS was going to eventually bite it in the ass.
It if weren’t for that, it’d be as easy as migrating the instance to a different jurisdiction. Which, speaking of, is a whack-a-mole game; what we need is to set up shop in some sort of international waters jurisdiction or something that has enough soverengity and amicability that assures say the UK can’t legally threaten it anymore than they can threaten a random online-delivery donut shop in Laos.
Ofcom don’t know what the Fediverse is.
It might be hard to enforce for every instance but even if only 1% of instance admins get strongly worded letters threatening fines if they don’t follow the law, I guarantee you that many more will just decide that it’s not worth the risk, they close their instances and we end up with even fewer users than before.
Lol, Ofcom still are stuck trying to ban 4chan. You overestimate their ability.
And you overestimate the amount of bullshit the average instance admin is willing to put up with. Sure there will be a few instances who can afford lawyers, offshore servers, whatever. But the majority are hobbyists who think this whole fediverse thing is neat as long as it costs a few bucks for an off the shelf web host and a bit of free time to moderate. And if those people get legal threats, they will either comply or get out because running an instance with 100 users is just not worth the risk of ruining your life.
The fediverse wouldn’t die completely but it would for sure lose many smaller instances. We’ve already lost larger ones like lemm.ee for less.
They don’t need to lawyer up if they have no presence in the UK. They can just send them a meme picture of a hamster.
Lemm.ee shut down for entirely unrelated reasons.
I just hope they don’t all go to “lemmy.world” or some huge instance. Regardless, even the @eucommission is understanding the value of the fediverse and has its own mastodon instance. The German government is also going more opensource, the Dutch government wants to have an alternative to GitHub that might join the fediverse, France has the DINUM which seems to want to aggressively leave US big tech behind.
One big problem I see with the EU finally noticing opensource is that they are new to the game and will take lobbying money. Solutions like BlueSky might easily lead them astray, but I seriously hope they will see “developed by USAians” and go “fuck that, we want Mastodon that’s spearheaded by a German non-profit”.
It’s very imaginable that more duds like BlueSky will pop up to distract from the fediverse and try to grab a piece of the monetary and attention pie the EU has.
Doubtful - Lemmy’s userbase continues to shrink or at best hold steady, and while PieFed continues to keep doubling in size, its total subscriber count remains a moderate fraction of Lemmy’s.
On the other hand, the tools keep getting better - excruciatingly slowly, but consistently nonetheless.
Currently not looking too good… We have a pretty constant 1 million active users. Despite all the previous enshittification of mainstream social media. But yeah, that’s the spirit 👍
million
Let’s continue to do our best to promote, over time people will find the way :))
And produce good content. Our small userbase is slowly building its own culture. We have the potentiel to let exist all the content that cannot survive the pressure of the algorithme.
building its own culture
Sometimes I see users recycle old overused jokes in the comment section.
Like come on. This is a different place. We don’t want to become a copy of Reddit.
