this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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I appreciate optimism, and thinking about what can be done now is certainly the point of asking these questions.
But I think realistically the fedi may only have so many opportunities to prove itself to the world. On the whole question of how does someone handle business and money with the fediverse, it already seems to be behind.
I dont think we have a limited time frame to prove things. Mastodon is at 3mil users, Lemmy is holding on the tens of thousand's, we have the intial traction it takes to get a social network off the ground.
As long as these popular networks share activitypub, than the protocol itself is available for other like minded networks with different focuses, like a substack-a-like. It's the strength of an open protocol and a lack of profit motive that lets these fledgling services standup and survive while they mature into reliable competitors to for profit offerings.
I'm with you. But just to clarify, I'm not talking about time per se but rather these opportunities where a platform like Substack or Twitter drops the ball. I worry they'll be somewhat limited in the short-medium term.
Maybe I'm wrong and their occurrence is a symptom of some deeper shift that will persist until a new equilibrium is reached.
My fear though is that a fatigue will settle from this online discourse fracturing, and people will get tired of "moving" or keeping track of what new thing they're supposed to join and realise, with a serious kernel of truth, that part of the point of online spaces is to pick one and stay there and build a culture there and standup for that place's quality and resilience against whatever forces would seek to trash it.
If something like that settles in, I can see something like the fediverse getting a bad reputation as an ecosystem that misses the point of the whole thing with its shifting and fragile instances. Maybe I'm way wrong, but I've put this on my bingo card.