As much as I am also annoyed at how everyone seems to be treating Bluesky as some sort of a messiah as if it's somehow fundamentally different than Twitter, do we actually want Fedi to become THE mainstream social network? Do we wanna get flooded with twitter people bringing in twitter mentalities and social habits? I like the weird little social space we have here and we already have enough icky "normal" people on instances like mastodon.social. I don't personally want even more mastodon.social-type people on here..
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@njion This is very much an "in favor of an in-group" post. We do not need to "get users fast to grow stocks", but if we don't get folks to use fedi, it will slowly die from the Myspace effect.
@kescher I mean there needs to be some growth, sure. And I believe there has been. But I don't think we need to capture massive crowds from the current Twitter exodus.
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@njion @kescher That's how I feel about it as well - it's important to make sure that folks who fit into the culture can find the place and that there's some change in the "group" over time (not even growth necessarily!), but that doesn't mean that we need to appeal to *everybody*.
You don't actually need very many people to keep a social place alive, and the idea that you do is a very recent one from the "massive social network" era - it didn't really work like that before that either. The Myspace effect was mostly because Myspace didn't have a lot of redeeming features beyond "everybody is there"; if popularity is explicitly your selling point, then you *do* need that to survive, but that's a choice.
(This does mean that fedi as a whole needs to get its shit together and start focusing more on its unique features to survive, rather than trying to copycat and "win the popularity contest" that it cannot win, but that is a different discussion)
