For years, the internet has been shrinking. Not in size, not in data, but in ownership. A vast, decentralized network of personal blogs, forums, and independent communities has been corralled into a handful of paved prison yards controlled by a few massive corporations. Every post, every “friend,” every creative work—
I feel like this is comparing the mall to the park.
They both attract people, but not always the same people, or for the same reasons. And that’s OK.
I get what you’re saying though, because I’ve felt this way when trying to come up with reasons for people (sole proprietors) to get with the fedi, but maybe this place is just not for influencers - not like the corp platforms, anyway. I think the fediverse will attract more and more people with its network effects, but probably never all of the people all of the time.
My modest hope is that the fedi bleeds the big platforms just enough to put them in their place and keep from enshittifying to infinity.
The things people need to build a livelihood on a platform are quality of life features. In a lot of cases, I think it’s small stuff: being able to reward patrons with a tag on a specific community; automatically highlighting popular posts; making it easy to find a user’s monetization page; etc.
At the moment, Lemmy is an ad-free version of Reddit missing some community and notification features. There are good political reasons to be here, but that hasn’t driven a sustained increase in users.
So we won’t get critical mass for network effects by being a better Reddit.
One to make the platform self-sustaining (or grow) is to give creators a reason to use the platform, which will give people a reason to come and stay.