I feel that it is time to have an honest discussion on the state of the fediverse.
Mastodon was founded a decade ago, and since then has roughly 1 million monthly active users. That is 0.25% of the MAU of twitter/X currently (which has itself seen declines over the years).
Pixelfed has 250k monthly active users, which is 0.008% of Instagrams 3 billion MAU.
Friendica has 5000 MAU which is essentially 0% of the 3.1 billion MAU that Facebook has.
Overall, even if you combine every fediverse platform together, and count bluesky as a part of the fediverse as well, it’s still less than 1% of the MAU of X.
Which is all to say, alternatives to corporate owned platforms does not exist at this point in time, on a statistical basis. Not in any meaningful way.
So why is this do we think? Why does the most popular social media site in the world not even have a decent competitor out there, when we have the technology to build one? 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, as the realities of corporate oligarchy have become to hard for the average person to ignore. Governments and organizations around the world have started discussing the alternatives to American owned tech companies. And yet, growth of the fediverse platforms is essentially flat. People try a platform, and then quickly bounce off, either returning to old platforms or quitting social media all together.
That second one is not a problem in my mind, but let’s dive a bit deeper into the first point. Why do people not tend to stick around on the fediverse? Here are some potential root causes I can think of:
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The choices are overwhelming. There are dozens of fediverse platforms that provide every function under the sun. Even within a single platform, users are asked to pick a server, which is an instant friction point for users.
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Functionality on the fediverse is subpar compared to larger platforms, and the functionalities that do exist are disjointed between multiple platforms. We have events, but no standard event functionality integrated into mastodon. What does exist is a hack/workaround, rather than an actual implementation. Pixelfed does not have stories. There is a marketplace website for the fediverse (Flohmarkt), but no marketplace integration for friendica. Etc, etc.
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Users are afraid of losing their history and friends on other platforms. Every social media platform is required by law to provide a GDPR export of a users social media data, but no platform that I am aware of is using this to integrate a users post history or subscriptions to rebuild users social graph and profile on the fediverse. There are technical hurdles there for sure, but there are a lot of opportunities being left on the table.
So those are, imo, the biggest stumbling blocks to the growth of users on the fediverse, and why 99% of users bounce off when they try it. I am building some solutions to these problems myself, but I’m curious to hear what others think about this, and the honest state of the fediverse. Any issues I overlooked? Should we care about user growth at all? What do we think?
A few points:
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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).
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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.
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generalizing about the fediverse is not very useful IMO. look at specific software. when i saw 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.
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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.
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99% of atoms in existence are Hydrogen and Helium. And yet here we are.
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.
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.
Some already do that. The ones I am familiar with are in German though: social.heise.de and mastodon.derstandard.at.
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 relative to the all time search history. It’s completely exponential compared to previous time periods, but sadly we are also on the downswing of the trend. So we may have already missed the opportunity to catch these users, but it is worth noting.
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
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.
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.
The world does not revolve around you.
The problems of Corporate-owned social media affect all of society. We need an universal alternative that can be a real threat to them and alternatives like the Fediverse serving only the fringes do little more than act as a “managed opposition”.
What if making the fediverse into a real threat requires it to act more like a corporate-owned social media platform?
I’d say this is impossible, by design. The main problem of corporate social media is that it is controlled by an oligopoly, and we can not get this much concentration of power in a system that is designed to be distributed.
There are many reasons, but I think the ultimate explanation is that the fediverse isn’t even trying to compete with corporate-owned networks.
There are just too many things that confuse regular users - things they don’t need to think about on mainstream platforms, such as how to discover new content, why there are different servers, dramas around instance admins, and so on. You actually have to want to be here to overcome these obstacles.
And this is by design. The fediverse is many projects created and managed by many people. There is no single entity that could optimize the user experience and promote a single service.
So yeah, the fediverse is insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Is that a problem to solve? I’m not sure. The fediverse is a real alternative precisely because it’s different.
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.
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.
How old is TikTok?
The fact that the fediverse is young and evolving is what excites me about it. There is tremendous potential, we just have to realize it.
Also, I will mention that part of why Facebook took off like it did, initially, was the ability to import friends from Myspace. This is much more complex and nearly impossible to do today, but I really think we need to look at social graph imports for the fediverse, to allow people a life raft from closed wall platforms. The failures of the past were not an accident, they were carefully planned out by other entities who did things better.
The fact that the fediverse is young and evolving is what excites me about it.
ActivityPub has been around for 8 years, and IMO, the Fediverse is not evolving. It is not federating the way ActivityPub was designed for.
I want Mastodon threads in Lemmy. I want PeerTube subscriptions in Lemmy. I want to subscribe to Pixelfed users in Lemmy. I want all of these different ActivityPub communities to talk to each other.
I want to go to my front page and have it be the ultimate front page for me. Why should I be forced to use different pieces of software that pretend to communicate with the same protocol?! Lemmy is supposed to be a news aggregator, so fucking aggregate!
Fair! I will say that some platforms are better than others in this regard. For example, I was able to see this post on mastodon and reply to comments, but those comments do not show up on piefed. Not sure where they do show up, but I have had conversations from mastodon to users on Lemmy. So yea, it’s pretty disjointed and disorganized, and not living up to the full potential of what activitypub was designed to do.
Other people have said some things, but I’ll say some things too:
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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”
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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I like the fediverse specifically because the lack of normies
The global perspective isn’t necessarily the most helpful or insightful. e.g. Mastodon and Bluesky have pretty high amounts of users and active posters in Germany relative to X. Here is a source in German, there was a recent Lemmy post about it but I neglected to save it. Are Germans just masochists or huge nerds, or is it more of a marketing issue?
That was a very interesting post. Thanks for sharing :)
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 Google trends I have seen are far more than 0.1% of people out there. I know many people personally who would love to leave Facebook, but there is no good alternative, and the issues I mentioned above are contributing factors. We can keep sticking our head in the sand and saying that it is what it is, and the fediverse will never grow because no one wants it, or we can try to understand why users are not being retained and seek to address those issues. It’s less about validation and more about providing real alternatives for people. I kind of thought that was what this whole thing was about.
People looking up alternatives doesn’t mean they actually want to use them. Switching to an alternative necessarily means some pains, in terms of changed interface, functionality, and community. You can’t just magically switch between platforms and have all the people follow you there, and that’s a dealbreaker for many.
As far as I know, the fediverse is growing, just not explosively. We can hope that at some point it reaches a threshold that convinces a lot of people to move over, cementing it as a “proper” platform.
But these are real alternatives. They’re real alternatives that by the nature of them being non corporate are more difficult to market, stick in a neat box for consumers. But that’s not a negative.
I agree with anything that removes friction and helps people get away from corporate captured social media but fundamentally at some point where this is what the fediverse is and it’s why it’s the way it is.
Exactly. Corporate social media is too much of a money making machine, for the corporations, advertisers, and influencers. The fediverse doesn’t add to anyone’s bottom line. I’m convinced that there is nothing that could make the average person leave Meta’s platforms.
Are you saying that none of the points about the current structure of the fediverse are valid? That we should not try to have more streamlined and functional platforms for users to migrate to? The fact that these platforms are hard to market by their very nature would seem to be even more of an argument for a more fully featured and frictionless experience, would it not?
All else being equal? Sure. But even the way youre speaking right now would seem to imply some kind of overhead control, new standards, agreements, things of that nature that are already possible, but if imposedvwould go against the nature of the fediverse.
By that same token, there is a very real market out there clearly for a user friendly onboarding into the fediverse so, go build it? There isn’t anything stopping anyone from addressing the issues you’ve raised other than tech and adoption.
But you’re putting the cart before the horse IMO.
I am not suggesting to impose any standards on anyway. Thus why I made a post about it to spark discussion, rather than making some declaration one way or another. It needs to be collaborative and democratic, like the rest of the fediverse.
I am building alternatives, as I said in my post. I just thought I would put it out there for discussion to see what others think. Dismissing the conversation and refusing to engage with the actual points on the weaknesses of the fediverse in its current form is not productive, imo. I respect your opinion, and I’m glad you enjoy how it is now. Based on the numbers though, that is not universally the case.
Yeah I don’t know if a lot of people remember. But the rise of much of current social media was not organic or natural.
I’ve been accessing the internet since the very early 90s. Started out through fidonet if anyone remembers that. Was on Usenet, IRC, ICQ, AIM, MSN, Jabber, GeoCities, MySpace, tumblr etc. So it’s not like I’m completely out of the loop with things going on on the internet Etc. I remember first time really hearing about Twitter. Was while watching cable news. One day all the guests and hosts started bringing it up constantly. And talking about it and how everyone should use it. I found it strange then and I still find the system strange today. It isn’t really much for the average person. At least for many it doesn’t do all that much more for them than a simple WordPress or geocities site would. Apart from feeding into a larger API that can be mined for data by a company.
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!
It’s true that the network effect is a huge blocker to the larger success of the fediverse. Facebook solved this early on by making your profile “you”, so users could just search for a name of someone you know, and they pop up. The fediverse doesn’t work like that, currently.
I take quite a bit of issue with the last paragraph. It’s like saying “what do you think this is, some kind of social media platform”, when someone is looking for a place to post updates for relatives. You tell them to just text them. Sure, they could do that but it is by no means as seamless and easy to browse your history of content as something like Facebook or Instagram. You don’t get birthday reminders or mundane life updates through group text. How about bands or artists that want a profile to share their music or art? Should they text their followers too? Overall, I think it is a bit of a ridiculous statement and distracts from the topic at hand, which is how do we make the fediverse better and able to reach it’s full potential? Sure there are alternatives to social media out there. That’s not what we are talking about here.
You bring up a really good point about how Facebook once provided a really good and convenient service. Being able to have automated reminders and a place to send well wishes for birthdays is convenient. The same for having a central place to share photos with contacts rather than having to maintain a personal webpage or print slides and gather everyone over for a viewing party with a slide projector. It’s easier to say “follow my Facebook/Instagram/Twitter page” than it is to say “subscribe to my mailing list” and then maintain it.
That’s why the platforms became so popular in the first place. If that was still the primary function we’d probably still be there. But instead we have the choice to make. Whether we will put up with the enshittification in order to maintain access the neglected vestiges of what of what once made these platforms great; or if we maintain our freedom and go back to the old less convenient ways.
The fediverse won’t ever really be a replacement for those functions, the network effect is a filter for that. But it’s also not really designed to be, it’s meant to be pseudo-anonymous, decentralized, distributed, and portable and ephemeral. Great for being able to make arbitrary posts to a small network, easy to pick up your things and leave. It’s not great for putting your personal details on it and hoping your friends find you (there could be issues with federation keeping them from finding you, there is nothing keeping someone from impersonating you on the network)
I believe the fediverse is healthy for its use case, I don’t believe it will ever fully achieve the use cases of the platforms it’s replacing and that’s ok with me. I (and 1M+ of MAU on the the fediverse) find it perfectly fine for its use case
Edit: I may have misread your point and gone on a huge aside but my point is that I’m ok with the threaded platforms not chasing users to get to critical Reddit mass, I don’t see how mastodon can really be any easier to use, and friendica is more translating the fediverse experience to a familiar Facebook like interface than being a Facebook replacement. I think that maintaining the network is more important than recruiting people outside of it. If it’s a good experience, people will come in their own time.
Your last sentence highlights my primary point. How do we make the fediverse a good experience? That is the crux of my issue, and what I think is lacking. For 99+% of users, it is not a good experience currently, and I would like to understand how we can change that. I acknowledge the power of the network effect, but I do not think it is insurmountable or unable to be used to the advantage of the fediverse if we think creatively.
