Something very important to keep in mind when building community infrastructure, is that you haven't "lost" if some corporate alternative grows faster.

Fast growth is the domain of corporations. Invest a bag of money, get in, extract profits, get out, rinse and repeat. This model only makes sense if you don't fundamentally care about what you're building.

Community infrastructure grows differently; it grows slowly, organically, and sustainably. It doesn't need to be "first to market", or "scale fast", or "beat the competition", or "provide short-term profits", or any of the other things that corporate infrastructure need to do.

All it needs to do is *be there*, and slowly but surely incrementally improve over time, until such a time that it is unquestionably the best place for people to be, and untouchable by corporations. It's a marathon, not a sprint.

It has no "runway", no "deadlines". All that matters is making it a comfortable place that works for people, and getting people engaged in its continued development. On-boarding people folks slowly so that you're not just increasing numbers, you're actually having people stick around for the long term.

Basically: community infrastructure is just fundamentally more resilient, because it doesn't have the trappings of corporate goals. But you do need to take advantage of that resiliency, and not try to emulate corporate objectives that you can never meet.

Resist the temptation to maximize user numbers, and work on resilient infrastructure and loyal communities instead.

(This post inspired by the situation with fedi vs. Bluesky, but it's definitely not exclusive to it)