Theres a lot of websites that claim to track the fediverse in its totality. But the numbers are all over the place.
So…hows the Fedi vibe lately?
Theres a lot of websites that claim to track the fediverse in its totality. But the numbers are all over the place.
So…hows the Fedi vibe lately?
From my limited outsider’s perspective, things are tough right now. There’s a lot of momentum behind ATProto, the biggest competitor to ActivityPub, and a lot of the people who are thinking about decentralized social media have moved over to working in the Atmosphere. We’re also seeing a lot of pushback from existing users about improvements the social web foundation have been trying to implement, making them more wary and circumspect than they had been in the past. I’m somewhat anxious we’ll get lapped.
Aside from Bluesky, is there anything that actually has a big community of active users? What’s worth checking out? Every project I pop into still feels early and has pretty low engagement.
I’m referring here to protocol development, rather than community development. It was on my mind because of the announcement of the spaces alpha a few days ago. The canonical example of a community that exists outside of Bluesky is Blacksky, and I think the fact that it was built on ATProto rather than AcivityPub is the single greatest failure of the fediverse — our inability to create a space in which Black folks feel safe is our greatest shame.
Ahh. Make sense.
I didn’t follow Blue/Black sky evolution but I really fail to understand how existence of one additional active instance is seen as a success and such a loss for the other camp?
Bluesky is only a success if you measure it by active users. They folded to requests of governments for censorship (there was a case with Turkish opposition) and are therefore utter failure when it comes to freedom in the social media space.
The existence of BlackSky doesn’t say anything Fediverse’s failure in itself but it, in combination with Mastodon’s whiteness (it’s obvious if you spend some time there), does paint a very unpleasant narrative about how black people felt on Mastodon.
Im one of those who are not necessarily looking for the federation to be the meta for social media. Im pretty fine if it stays cozy.
I kinda like it — you wouldn’t have seen my comment and I wouldn’t have seen your reply otherwise, as we’re on different instances that only communicate via federation.