this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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Technology

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The aspect that makes the fediverse and in particular reddit-likes uniquely adapted to growing in this harsh corporate hellscape has everything in my opinion to do with the critical early seed phase of communities.

When you make a website with its own forum, you have huge friction to overcome with the network effect… but if you are plugging into a federated network than all of a sudden being a tiny community on lemmy with 2 or 3 people becomes an invitation to users passing by who already have an account to start a conversation and create that spark that will grow (slowly) into a real community.

Consider the minimum viable population of users in a community, how many people does there need to be in a room before that warm feeling of a gathering sets in with comfortable conversation naturally occurring? For federated lemmy communities (and similar Reddit-likes) federation effectively lowers that number by a significant amount since it puts doors everywhere that people can spontaneously wander through and contribute small amounts to help kindle a spark and get the community going.

This changes the paradigm of “social media platform metabolism” if you will, it facilitates much more organic early growth in communities.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Yup - federated communities grow specially well in a corporate landscape. However my concern is if they're able to stay dominant enough to prevent a cycle like:

  1. Corporate landscape.
  2. You got a few federated alternatives growing.
  3. Federations grow enough to become the main landscape.
  4. Corporations do something [I do not know what] better than federations.
  5. Corporates grow to the point of dwarfing the federations, into a corporate landscape.

For example, it's possible for me that corporations are specially able to exploit a federated landscape through EEE. I'm just conjecturing though.