Fediverse

Growth narratives on the fediverse:

My own take on it is that growth is not very important in terms of how a network develops. The only truly successful growth is that which happens completely organically. Worrying about why one service has 'stopped' growing is pointless. Those who are unhappy jump ship - those who remain are likely people who are never going to and/or bots or influencers who aren't interested in being part of a community just finding a way to exploit it.

I would propose so-called 'smaller' networks (such as the fediverse) concentrate on quality not quantity. That has the duel benefit of making the experience for current users even better and makes the network attractive to those who are outside looking in.

[T]he reason why people care so much about Twitter and finding a good replacement is not because of total user numbers: Twitter was always the smallest of the Big Tech platforms after all. Twitter and X matter because of its unparalleled ability to generate culture and shape politics. Twitter and X are the places where elite consensus is formed. It is the dominant platform for shaping our collective understanding of the world. That’s why control over X’s algorithm (and chatbot) is so valuable: it is not about telling individuals what is correct, but it is about influencing what people think about what other people think.

So Twitter/X is where people higher in the hierarchy go to publicly perform their opinions, while people lower in the hierarchy sort themselves into their teams.

That sounds like the classical Greek democracy I remember from school.

But hearing it laid out like this ("elite consensus") sounds instinctively gross.