Unless google or facebook starts trying to spaghetti up the codebase then drop it, I don't expect it to go anywhere
this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
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Facebook is trying with Threads. Threads is directly targeting Fedi. Thankfully, it does not seem to be working the way Meta wanted it to work – that is, to start sucking people in from fedi due to sheer size and presumably better UI. Turns out people who had moved to fedi really hate Meta, who'da thunk it.
I don't mean them trying to compete. I'm referring to a thing they've done before. They offer help to an open source project but their help ends up driving the project into the ground.
Yeah. Thankfully, Fediverse is a bunch of independent projects. There are Pleroma, different Misskey forks, Lemmy, kbin, Pixelfed, Loops, GoToSocial, and dozens more.
Mastodon is still probably the biggest, user-count-wise, but if Mastodon does a real stupid, there's going to be a fork that takes over the mindshare and the instances. This happened with OpenOffice → LibreOffice when the former got taken over by Oracle; this happened with XFree86 → X.org. This happened with ownCloud → Nextcloud.
And there are projects like FediPact, explicitly opposed to having anything to do with Meta on an instance level.
Federated social media has been around for a long time; the oldest one that I know of was identi.ca from the late 2000s. ActivityPub platforms like Mastodon have since breathed a lot of life into the federated ecosystem and I'm excited to see what the future holds for it.
Arguably, the first federated social media is email from 1981. A more “social networking” type system is IRC from 1988.
Yup. Up until roughly the times of early Twitter, federated, decentralized communication systems were the obvious norm to any engineer designing one.
Twitter was even meant to be federated and decentralized. I had interviewed one of their first engineers (this piece is about BlueSky, and in Polish; the Twitter thing is important background), who was there and working on that in the very early days. They had a proof of concept. But then the VCs got involved and the decision was that it would be harder to make money on a decentralized service. Rest is history.
How about Usenet (1980)?
Oh, yeah, that even predates email!
Yeah, I had an account on identi.ca. I even wrote about this: https://rys.io/en/168.html
Ah yeah, I remember reading that post awhile ago. I was quite surprised to find out how old Friendica is (first release in 2010); if that doesn't demonstrate longevity, then I dunno what does.
inb4 all the people who always show up to complain that we need famous people on here for anyone to give a shit about the Fediverse.
Emphatically, I am here because it's all just random weirdos.
Why thank you Snot Flickerman, I think you're pretty random yourself. (/s but not in a butthurt way)
there is a ton of famous people active on Mastodon tho. George Takei. John Scalzi. James Gunn. Cory Doctorow. Charlie Stross. William Gibson. Ron Gilbert.
Some left a year ago tho, probably for BlueSky, like Linus Torvald, Stephen Fry, Mark Ruffalo, Greta Thunberg, Felicia Day, etc.
A bunch of official european channels too like the european commission.
Mastodon has more of a flat structure and is designed to be more conversational which is why I think it hasn't caught on amongst celebrities and the pundit class. It's great for conversation but only so-so at self promotion.
Lance Ulanoff has replied to this blog post: https://mastodon.social/@Lance_Ulanoff/114285108628269898
Nice to see he took it in stride given how.. aggressive the post was about him lol
Yup, I really appreciate he did reply. Gotta say that it did improve my opinion of him.
@rysiek@mstdn.social's blog is one of my favorites. He really understand the social aspect to a lot of modern technology.
Aww, thank you!
I did not realize you were OP (or even had a Lemmy account) 😂
They really shat on Lance in this article, lol.
That was a fun read. Loved the sarcasm.