Long read but well worth it if you care.
Edit: I found the author’s initial posts on Mastodon. It’s also well-worth the read.
Long read but well worth it if you care.
Edit: I found the author’s initial posts on Mastodon. It’s also well-worth the read.
I read the first half and skimmed the rest. The primary complaints seem to be that the fediverse isn’t centralized, monolithic, stupid easy to use, and just like every corporate controlled network.
Ok. Cool. Fine with me. I wouldn’t call it failure if it is what it set out to be.
Also there’s that odd idea most people have that unless a thing has majority “market share”, or already the mentum to overtake the market leader, that thing has failed.
The fediverse isn’t even commercial, it’s not on the “market” to begin with. And it’s consistently growing.
Even if it weren’t, that’s still not a failure. It literally doesn’t need to make any money at all to keep doing its thing.
It’s just a shining example of how MBA-brain has infested tech spaces, possibly irreparably.
Tech is driven by the up-or-out, billion-users-or-death, monopoly-or-bankruptcy mentality to the point that it’s leaked from investors to management to average employees and, shockingly, most of the fediverse is tech or tech-adjacent types so it’s not really surprising that this mentality is extremely prevalent: you go with what you know, and if you’re in tech it’s growth growth growth.
Regardless of if, say, Lemmy ends up with 10 million MAUs or 10,000 MAUs, or 1,000 MAUs, the measure of success is NOT how many users, but if the users who ARE there find value and worth in what exists. If you’ve got 1,000 happy users sharing ideas and conversing meaningfully then congrats! you created immense value, just uh, no money.