this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025
470 points (100.0% liked)
Fediverse
28930 readers
2677 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't agree at all with the lack of ambition.
Well the fact is yes, Mastodon is still relatively small compared to Facebook, X or Bluesky. Mastodon has actually 7,616,908 users total: https://fedidb.org/software/mastodon. Which is a huge number, but most likely a lot of bot accounts and non-active account to be honest.
Now the reason why is Mastodon is not as large as Bluesky is debatable. I actually blame ActivityPub protocol and the complex nature of trying to become a federated platform.
Let's be honest now, most people do not care (or don't have the technical knowledge) to understand federation or decentralization. Hence people will just jump to the easiest solution: A big centralized server, aka X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Bluesky. Same for search engines like Google.
The problem is not with the federated model, per se. Matrix is federated and it has 100M+ users.
The problem is a cultural one: Mastodon promoted federation along the idea that instances should be aligned with its member's identity. It's a mistake of their own doing, which was reflected on their own UX and marketing copy for a long time.