I wish folks would stop equating size of userbase with "success" of platform, it's never been an interesting metric to look at unless you're talking about megaplatforms that need millions and millions of people so they can just about break even by sell...
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I wish folks would stop equating size of userbase with "success" of platform, it's never been an interesting metric to look at unless you're talking about megaplatforms that need millions and millions of people so they can just about break even by selling data and eyeballs.
Back in the forum days nobody worth taking seriously was anxious about getting millions of people onto a forum, were they? And those forums weren't "failures" because of that, cuz they still connected people with similar interests together.
Stuff like user safety, fun, sustainability, and sense of community seem more interesting to talk about, to me, when evaluating whether a space is worthwhile to engage with. Raw numbers are boring.
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Comrade Kip Van Den Bosreplied to Comrade Kip Van Den Bos last edited by
Like obviously a space is gonna wither if it's full of fucking arseholes and nobody is having a good time; and I think talking in terms of pure numbers of monthly active users actually occludes whether or not the vibes are good.
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Comrade Kip Van Den Bosreplied to Comrade Kip Van Den Bos last edited by
Anyway I also have some qualms with folks discussing "the fedi" as some monolithic "thing" with a number of people using it, cuz it doesn't really make sense. Two people using "the fedi" might never even cross paths cuz their software has different affordances and their friend circle is so different, and adding one to the other and counting that as 2 "fedi users" ignores all the interesting differences.
It's a bit like lumping all different forum visitors on different forum softwares together back in the day and saying something like "the forum platform has x number of users"; it doesn't logically follow imo.
I think especially as people move towards allowlist federation it's gonna make less sense to talk about "the fedi" as a cultural monolith, and more sense to talk about multiple fedis or even just communities.