One thing about the Fediverse (Mastodon) is that most people aren't on it.
As I found with one marketing experiment, this makes it terrible if your goal is to reach as many consumers as possible in a niche.
But HN members who aren't mass-marketing could change that, by moving to the Fediverse -- giving it their endorsement, and network effects.
> this makes it terrible if your goal is to reach as many consumers as possible in a niche.
Amazing. Another great reason to be there as a person trying to interact with other people.
I know, that's a terrible image, and I should be the last person suggesting such an image.
I was mentioning one use case that's a showstopper that much of HN would appreciate, and which forces a lot of the people who attract other people to be on the proprietary platforms.
Of course a risk of making Fediverse become more popular is ruining it for those people who want very small-neighborhood community. And who don't mind that, on any given topic, they're basically stuck with the handful of people who happened to be there, not those who would be most interested.
I'd still like to make Fediverse more welcoming to more people, to get more people on it.
I have an optimistic belief that a more popular Fediverse could be better than any of the commercial alternatives. Though it would become more like them in some ways, as it grows.
>But HN members who aren't mass-marketing could change that, by moving to the Fediverse -- giving it their endorsement, and network effects.
Why? Why should HN members, or anyone else, move to another network with the same kinds of fragmentation and mutual mass bannings (and/or demands for mass bannings) that we are talking about here with Bluesky? See, for example, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195>
Because with mastodon, you can just run your own server, and continue using the network.
Between my single-user-instance and Facebook's billion-user Threads, ActivityPub is genuinely decentralised.
The irony of that example is that it is not the same as BlueSky here. There were huge parts of the FediVerse entirely untouched by what happened at Mastodon.LOL .