I wrote an article back in 2020 warning against relying on privately owned platforms for creating communities and public forums. These companies are not accountable to the users, and they curate the content on the platforms in opaque ways that ultimately serve the interests of the owners of these companies. The same Marxist argument about workers owning their tools applies to digital platforms as well. We have to have software that’s developed in the open, and that’s hosted by volunteers, and funded directly by the community. This is the only way to ensure that our interests are represented.
https://justiceinternationale.com/articles/2020-12-02-we-must-own-our-tools/
the problem is, how the fuck do we get normies to use our shit, big problem for the fediverse rn imo
I think that slow and steady growth is actually a positive. I’d argue that the key part to focus on right now is sustainability. This involves having enough devs to work on the platforms, enough people who are willing to host them, and enough users to produce content. Once these three criteria are met, then the platform will stick around indefinitely. This is a very different dynamic from commercial platforms that need to find ways to monetize and grow to stay viable.
Mastodon now has millions of users, and now there are a bunch of other compatible platforms like Pleroma that all work on the same protocol and interop with each other. It’s very much in the real of being indefinitely sustainable in my opinion. Even Lemmy with hundreds of thousands of users has likely passed the threshold at this point. So, I’m not too worried about rapid growth as an aspect of viability for the fediverse.
Meanwhile, the slow trickle of users means that new people end up adapting to the existing culture, and this is an important feature in my opinion. When you have a stampede of people come in from the mainstream, they bring the mainstream culture along with them and their views become dominant. We already saw this happening to an extent on the popular Lemmy instances after the Reddit migration.
I expect that we’ll continue seeing more and more incidents happening on commercial platforms as they crackdown on political speech, and we’ll be seeing more and more waves of people join the fediverse. And the bigger fediverse gets the more attractive it becomes since there’s increasingly more content available.
TLDR here is that we shouldn’t worry too much about rapid growth, and instead focus on making sure things are sustainable. The growth will happen organically over time.
I think that slow and steady growth is actually a positive.
I agree, but im not sure if we’re actually slowly and steadily growing. Like im not convinced anything on the fediverse is growing, even mastodon, seems more like we very slowly bleed users until there’s a massive fuck up and everyone gets a fire under their ass to actually look for alternatives, which more just leads to massive spikes in users that are hard for alternatives to handle
I agree with the part about owning our digital tools, the Fediverse community turns social media into a more transparent process with FOSS, and helps to turn otherwise complex software into user-friendly packages that can be setup more easily, thus putting more power into the hands of the people.
We still have to keep in mind that decentralized FOSS social media platforms aren’t different from traditional social media in terms of potential to turn into reactionary walled gardens. So there needs to be something done different to avoid the cycle of:
(anarchist) decentralization -> (capitalist) centralization -> (anarchist) re-decentralization
For sure, there needs to be a conscious political effort to promote sound ideas. Simply having open source platforms doesn’t magically solve that problem, but it is a prerequisite for having a voice. It’s also worth noting that decentralization is perfectly compatible with principled organizing. The key is to work on building a common set of ideas and understanding across the network that’s grounded in sound theory.
