The lemmings are a squeaky bunch.
this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
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The fediverse doesn't need perpetual growth. That's VC investor bullshit. You don't need to be posting on a platform where the whole world is present. Again more corporate bullshit. As is the "digital town square" thing. It sounds profound but it's pompous.
What made the internet so good was variety. Which is what reddit seemed to offer in a time when the older paradigms namely message boards were becoming antiquated.
What we got with the oligopoly of social platforms is watered down to memes and politics. It's right wing cultural imperialism quite frankly. People have been battered into fear of being who they are online because in this age of centralized internet has made it a war to remove anything unacceptable (aka "woke"). There's no variety. There's nobody being themselves.
The fedeverse will have arrived if it manages to achieve distinct varieties. On a technical basis it's perfectly positioned to achieve this. Right now it's largely just reddit clones offering little more than an extension of the cultural/political wars embroiling the handful of centralized social media platforms.
I reckon this is key. So many people seem to take the view that since such-and-such site is very small compared to Facebook or Twitter or whatever, then it must be failing; As if maximising the number of users is the ultimate goal.
Maximising users might be the goal for investors, so that they can monetise and maximise profits. But for people actually using the service, it's totally beside the point. We don't need to be in conversation with 100,000,000 people at once. More people doesn't always make it better. In many cases it actually makes it worse.
Having the giant userbase does make it more likely there are enough people into whatever weird niche you are to have a reasonable community though. I mean, how else are you going to get a community going for, I don't know, hyper-realistic simulations of underwater basketweaving or w/e?
The only thing I miss about the sprawl of reddit is the activity in niche subreddits. Hopefully, the variety implicit to the fediverse enables us to toe the line between VC expansionism and rich communities for obscure interests.