> There’s no metric of success for non-commercial ones. They simply exist as long as at least two users are using them to communicate.
Trying to get social media users out of "big number go up" mindset is really, really hard. Twitter has something like 450 million active users, and a lot of them are miserable with it, especially the heavier users. But if you try to suggest maybe just not using it, it seems like it is a "foregone conclusion" that it is the only way to go, as if there's no possible way to just do something else. Why go somewhere where you can get 100 meaningless "like" button clicks when you can go on twitter and get tens of thousands of meaningless "like" button clicks?
The worse part is that this mindset is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because users that think this way don't think it's worth bothering with anything that has less than a hundred million users. Naturally, this helps ensure that most of the growth will continue to go to just a handful of highly popular networks, since they're the only ones worth bothering with. While counts of users are meaningless, there are some knock-on effects to having most people believe alternatives are worthless. For people who produce art or videos or other forms of content, it means that you pretty much have to use the mainstream platforms, because a large amount of people are unwilling to use anything else even to follow people they're interested in, which also depresses your ability to grow and succeed. While monetary success and internet fame should absolutely never be the goal of social media or the internet, the fact remains that if you are an artist on the Internet, you are not going to get as many commissions or as much business opportunity if you're not on huge platforms like Twitter, and that means that the financial sustainability of a lot of internet creative works depends on a few tech companies.
But that's kind of the thing. That's basically WHY federated networks are good and we should want them to succeed. Indeed, it is true that there is no meaningful success metric for a social network. However, the "success" of the Fediverse is a bit different: I think it "succeeds" when it becomes viable to publish on ActivityPub as a complete alternative to needing to use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. But of course, that's not a constant value. It's not some constant amount of users. It depends on many factors. However, it will be pretty obvious when you see it, because it will come in the form of seeing people do healthy business over just ActivityPub.
I empathize if this sounds arbitrary or pointless, but I think a lot of people don't grasp the impact of this. For all of its flaws, this would effectively mean that you could go back to running your own damn sites, because they can participate in ActivityPub just the same as anyone else.
ActivityPub could fill the void left by the downturn in popularity of RSS, and then some.
Trying to get social media users out of "big number go up" mindset is really, really hard. Twitter has something like 450 million active users, and a lot of them are miserable with it, especially the heavier users. But if you try to suggest maybe just not using it, it seems like it is a "foregone conclusion" that it is the only way to go, as if there's no possible way to just do something else. Why go somewhere where you can get 100 meaningless "like" button clicks when you can go on twitter and get tens of thousands of meaningless "like" button clicks?
The worse part is that this mindset is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because users that think this way don't think it's worth bothering with anything that has less than a hundred million users. Naturally, this helps ensure that most of the growth will continue to go to just a handful of highly popular networks, since they're the only ones worth bothering with. While counts of users are meaningless, there are some knock-on effects to having most people believe alternatives are worthless. For people who produce art or videos or other forms of content, it means that you pretty much have to use the mainstream platforms, because a large amount of people are unwilling to use anything else even to follow people they're interested in, which also depresses your ability to grow and succeed. While monetary success and internet fame should absolutely never be the goal of social media or the internet, the fact remains that if you are an artist on the Internet, you are not going to get as many commissions or as much business opportunity if you're not on huge platforms like Twitter, and that means that the financial sustainability of a lot of internet creative works depends on a few tech companies.
But that's kind of the thing. That's basically WHY federated networks are good and we should want them to succeed. Indeed, it is true that there is no meaningful success metric for a social network. However, the "success" of the Fediverse is a bit different: I think it "succeeds" when it becomes viable to publish on ActivityPub as a complete alternative to needing to use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. But of course, that's not a constant value. It's not some constant amount of users. It depends on many factors. However, it will be pretty obvious when you see it, because it will come in the form of seeing people do healthy business over just ActivityPub.
I empathize if this sounds arbitrary or pointless, but I think a lot of people don't grasp the impact of this. For all of its flaws, this would effectively mean that you could go back to running your own damn sites, because they can participate in ActivityPub just the same as anyone else.
ActivityPub could fill the void left by the downturn in popularity of RSS, and then some.