Tech Press don’t understand the #Fediverse, so how can they understand its growth?
To hear them talk, most of them believe that #Mastodon and the Fediverse are one and the the same. Some of them go so far as to call the Fediverse the “Mastodon network”.
Which means that they don’t have a clue about what the Fediverse entails, nor how it has grown.
Case in point: between Jan-May 2023, #Misskey and its forks grew by 300,000 accounts. No one in the Tech Press reported this.
Okay, perhaps they didn’t know because the bulk of growth happened in Japan. But still, this is fairly important to know since Misskey is now responsible for generating the bulk of Fediverse content. Still, Tech Press think the Fediverse is about Mastodon.
And now, #Lemmy and #Kbin are experiencing lots of growth, with both collectively gaining 100,000 users in a week. This is quite a noteworthy event since the #RedditMigration is part and parcel of dissension on #Reddit – a pretty major Big Social platform.
Does the Tech Media report on this? Nope. But again, that’s because they don’t understand the Fediverse nor what it entails.
Then Meta signal that a new project they’re making, #P92 (a.k.a., #Barcelona), will be joining the Fediverse. There’s even screenshots that show this app interacting with remote Fediverse servers.
But instead of reporting about how this will affect the existing Fediverse, press such as the #BBC say this is an altogether different social network than Mastodon.
That’s right! Tech Press don’t even realize P92 will be joining the Fediverse – a social network that already exists!
Is this all ridiculous? Yes.
But this is why we have to be forthright about what the Fediverse is, what it entails, and what it all matters.
We, on the Fediverse, must be our own Press.
Having played around in the fedi for half a year now, I'm not entirely sure I get how it all fits together either!
Yeah it's neat that in theory my Masto account let's me comment on peertube videos or write posts in a Lemmy community. But in practice, lack of any account portability means that discoverability of non-Mastodon content is very low and my interactions with non-Masto content non-existant.
Likw i just don't fundamentally *get* how a twitter-clone, a youtube-clone, and a reddit-clone are meant to interoperate?
I can't use one account across all of them, which as a user is my number 1 expectation: that I can just show up with my account from whereever and join in.
Being able to treat a Lemmy community like it's a long toot-thread on Masto isn't a great experience, so why put effort into that form of compatibility?
I'd say think of it like how the same website might be sent to both a modern web browser displaying to a large screen AND to an ancient greyscale cellphone.
ActivityPub takes care of broadcasting content to different applications, but after that it's up to the application to figure out what in the world to do with it.
Yeah, the ancient cell phone interface might not do too well with a modern webpage, but http leaves that up to the phone to figure out :)
