With the news that Firefish is basically shutting down I am seeing a worrying trend happening on federated services recently. Because it is fairly easy to move your account around, services and platforms that federate just seem to pop up, struggle and then shut down routinely. When threads is by far the biggest federated platform with around 50 times more MAU (monthly active users) than Mastodon but around 50% of activitypub instances actively block it that results in a weird inbalance that cannot really be sustainable in the long run!
https://info.firefish.dev/notes/9xsukr38m3komd63
It is very, very difficult to see how this will change either as one of the great advantages of this ecosystem is also it’s biggest flaw in my opinion. I also see this with things like peertube as instances find out that they can be run well, have a few thousand users yet still have tiny traffic and reach as the youtube et al juggernauts run right over them. In fact I am seeing less and less traffic around the fediverse in general as social media seems to have crested the summit and is in decline.
I’m not sure what the future will bring but for me personally, it appears that the fediverse in general had a great chance pre threads, but that chance has been lost now. 2024 has seen some massive changes, and federated services and platforms have some serious challenges ahead.
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