I’ve never seen Loops but i like it purely because it reminds me of

Enjoy being the only one posting.

Mass adoption is fundamental to make any social media viable; the fewer users it has, the less useful it is. Reddit has more users than Lemmy. It’s that simple. People won’t start switching until everybody else switches.

Bluesky is only barely starting to compete with Twitter, and that’s after Twitter drastically worsened. Lemmy is a long, long way from competing with Reddit.

To me, it’s a matter of time. The structural advantages of the fediverse mean that it’s more stable on the long run; what i mean by that is, for-profit Reddit will get worse while Lemmy remains good, leading users to migrate here, so Lemmy will eventually outlive Reddit. And then along the way there will be a few big moments where Reddit really fucks up and a wave of people washes up on Lemmy. This is already happening, i’m pretty sure all of us here made our accounts after the Reddit API changes.

I feel strongly that we should defederate, but i really like your reasoning for being neutral. The fediverse is currently a small community of advanced internet users who see themselves as separate from mainstream users, and the temptation is to gatekeep.

Since 2010 i’ve made three Facebook accounts, deleted one and never use the other two. Active users would be a more useful metric.

It’s been commented on before that, for its size, Twitter has a disproportionate influence not just on the internet but even on politics. This is still the case today because no good alternatives have emerged for the mainstream yet.

Shifting the power from a CEO to an instance admin is a massive improvement.

One has autocratic control over the entire site, potentially hundreds of millions of users, investors breathing down their neck, server infrastructure, and other systemic pressures; meanwhile, a fediverse instance admin has autocratic control over nothing but their own instance, a few thousand users at most, with the only money and hardware involved being their own.

The fediverse is incredibly more horizontal and decentralized than any corporate social media, the improvement is massive. And i’m a believer that vertical structures and concentrations of power are at the root of a lot of problems in society, so this is gravy to me.

But yes, it’s worth remembering that it’s not completely decentralized, and admins still have absolute power over their instance. My Mastodon instance admin doesn’t want us to use the name GIMP to refer to the open source image manipulator; they say “gimp” is a slur aimed at disabled people, which i’ve never heard before in my life.

This is just a different manifestation of a core problem the fediverse has: it can get annoying to try to interact with content outside of your own instance.

And then we wonder why people flocked to Threads instead of Mastodon.

I really think the federated aspect should be almost invisible infrastructure, like how we never think about OpenSSL behind the scenes when we make a secure payment. There’s even a browser plugin to simplify Mastodon federation, so it can’t be that hard. Frankly, something even more seamless than that should be the default.

But it wasn’t designed this way for whatever reason, i’m sure there’s good reasons but it’s hard to empathize when i follow a link and suddenly i find myself in a new place where i’m not logged in, even though this “place” is still on Lemmy.

It’s the same thing that makes any social media attractive: everybody else is there and it’s where things are happening. This critical mass of users is the hardest thing for a website to gain and the hardest to lose.