What counts as “success”? In the fediverse, that’s a pretty nebulous concept. It hasn’t replaced all of Twitter or Facebook or any other commercial service, but so what?
It seems like not enough people are using it to make a difference. And the people who use it, also uses other platforms for the same purpose. Correct me if I am wrong.
The early and (IMHO) best days of Usenet, Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, Twitter, etc were the intense concentrations of particular interests .. groups of { Network | Civil | Mechanical | Electrical | Numerical } Engineers, Biologists, Programmers, Lawyers, Mathematicians, Physicists, Artists, etc.
Mastodon, as I see it ATM, has the kernal of the same and is trending into comunnity clusters with cross fertilisation.
The specialist math mastodon community is good fun and has more and more people every month - in time it'll snowball and potentially draw in the bulk of the online math crowd.
Twitter saw a peak in the world following accounts in Ukraine, if and when another major world event is locally reported and discussed on an ad hoc mastodon instance that too will spike acceptance.
Or it may fall by the wayside .. but the argument of "not enough people are (yet) using it" has applied to all the major social networks in their early days.
It probably depends from person to person. If you use the Fediverse to talk with friends, that’s the only thing that matters, much like how you can still have communities using IRC.
On the other hand if you’re someone who uses social media for content (like me), the Fediverse is woefully inadequate right now. I make up for it by using a Twitter and RSS bridge. You can also use Friendica which has this built in.
I wondered this as well, and I thought if you implemented something similar but made it super simple to setup and configure it could maybe catch on. One way could be to build it in Golang and make it zero-config. This way it is just one file that you need to open.
Maybe this is what Nostr is doing. Do anyone have experience with Nostr?
I am working on this. It’s based on GoToSocial and packages it into a nice to use GUI app for Mac and Windows. There are a few problems:
1. Domain names. It costs money. Can add integration to Google Domains, or allow free subdomains.
2. NAT. I believe the easiest method would be to have a reverse-tunnelling server run on donations.
3. Curbing abuse; the last thing we want is for admins to indiscriminately block the reverse-tunnel IP or the free subdomains due to it being “too easy” to set up new servers. I’m not sure exactly how to curb it, the idea is just to remove access when there are reports, but a way to prevent alt accounts would be to use an identity provider like Google, perhaps. Another thing is to decouple the subdomain/reverse-tunnel service with the app itself.
4. Keeping your computer on 24/7. Might not be too big of an issue since servers do retry sends, but might be an issue if too many people go non-24/7.
I’m open to suggestions.
I took the webpage down some time ago because I wasn’t working on it but it would be at https://getfedi.app. I’ll bring it back online soon.
Twitter alternatives can’t succeed due to existing network effects.
The only way to take on an existing social network paradigm is to add a feature to a separate already popular social network. E.g. instagram reels, youtube shorts vs TikTok.
Eventually would be better if ownership of data was separated from ownership of the client. Then landscape becomes much more competitive. Low barrier to entry to create competing implementations. The law will eventually recognize this imo
