@Cătă
Well, Lemmy is pretty much established right now and growing as well, despite being something different. Right now, this seems the biggest competitor to Mastodon in a way. But the limitation of Lemmy accounts not being able to follow other accounts (and only communities instead) makes it a bit of an outsider. Like, you can follow users from Friendica, Mastodon, even Hubzilla I think, and see their activity (comment, post), but they cannot see yours.

This also leads to the creation of a more specific culture, with people that are also unaware of other platforms and capabilities (albeit less pronounced, as the devs did a better job of keeping the whole ecosystem decentralized). For example, some users are surprised to hear that you can see their upvotes on other platforms.
The latter is mostly because the vast majority of Lemmy users didn't come from Mastodon but from Reddit. They weren't told much about the existence of a Fediverse, only that there's a thing called Lemmy which is many copies of Reddit before its enshittification, and these are connected with each other. That's all that many know. Just like many Mastodon users think the Fediverse is only Mastodon.

It doesn't help that Lemmy barely gets any interaction from other projects. Mastodon is huge, and Mastodon users should be all over Lemmy. But many Mastodon users have never heard about Lemmy. Those who have may find it too inconvenient to follow a Lemmy community because that involves using the account search and copy-pasting. Don't forget that the huge majority of Mastodon users is on phones. And those who do manage to follow Lemmy communities say that the interaction between Mastodon and Lemmy is too limiting.

For the record: I do have Lemmy followers.

Kbin and Mbin could have brought a solution to this issue, as they do support following users, even those from *blogging platforms, but because the projects are younger and less stable - and more so at the time of the Reddit migration - they failed to gain the required traction (i.e. more servers, user numbers more spread out across them) until now. There is still activity on these, they are still growing (people are joining them mostly because they are dissatisfied with the political leanings of the Lemmy devs, as well as their moderation policy on .ml which is subjective to say the least), but you can clearly see a bigger culture formed around Lemmy as of now.
/kbin made bidirectional *blogging-style following possible only by bolting microblogging onto a Reddit clone. Lemmy is a more purist Reddit clone, it doesn't support domestic *blogging, so users of *blogging projects can't follow Lemmy users in the traditional sense.

As for lemmy.ml, that instance doesn't matter that much anymore. Even lemmy.world has been surpassed as the biggest instance.

There seems to be something similar happening to Pixelfed, with user numbers growing month after month, and I am sure something similar will happen to Peertube when YouTube will flop badly again and PeerTube will be mature enough, or with Bookwyrm, Friendica, Hubzilla etc.
Pixelfed could become big if Instagram was enshittified so tremendously that everyone except the biggest attention whores ("But muh followers, but muh fame") will start looking for alternatives. The advantage of Pixelfed for Instagram users over Mastodon for Twitter users is that Pixelfed allows direct imports of Instagram accounts with all content.

I'm not so sure about PeerTube, not only because that'd require gigantic amounts of hard drive space, but also because many users are on YouTube for the money, and PeerTube won't pay them a penny. If they moved to PeerTube, they'd lose a source of income. Also, fewer YouTube users have ever heard of PeerTube than 𝕏 users have heard of Mastodon.

BookWyrm would be easier, but I can't see right now how Goodreads could be enshittified enough to cause a mass migration. Maybe, however, BookWyrm becomes interesting for people who don't even know Goodreads and its whole concept, and they find out about BookWyrm before they find out about Goodreads.

Friendica tried to take a chance long ago, back in the early 2010s. It even tried to facilitate the transition of whole social circles from Facebook by federating with Facebook by means of a cross-poster. It didn't work out. People didn't want to leave their "friends" behind, not to mention that the average Facebook user was even less technologically adept than the average Twitter user a good decade later. Even trying to mimic Facebook's UI didn't help.

Maybe it was for the better. Typical server hardware that Friendica ran on back in the day could barely handle over 130 accounts on one node. The notoriously power-hungry Facebook connector cut a dozen or two out of this number. Many public Friendica nodes with the Facebook connector on closed their registrations at a bit over 100 accounts. I think not even the biggest root servers would have given you a four-digit capacity.

It would simply have been impossible to accommodate a flood of Facebook refugees on Friendica. Even if Friendica users with Facebook contacts had started their own private nodes, most of them would have needed multiple nodes to even have space for a fraction of their Facebook "friends".

As for Hubzilla, it'll first need a lot of polish. And then I can't see from where people would come flooding to Hubzilla. Facebook refugees would rather pile onto Friendica, the traditional more-powerful-than-Diaspora* Facebook "clone", or maybe (streams), the Fediverse champion in permission control.

Hubzilla could be something for companies, for organisations, for political offices, for journalists, for scientists etc. I could even see modern and progressive left-wing parties use it; Pirate Parties, anyone? They wouldn't have to worry about hub capacities because they could either use specialised hubs, e.g. for journalists, or they'd run their own hubs anyway, just like they run their own Mastodon instances now. In fact, if that thicket of instances run by German public broadcasters was Hubzilla instead of Mastodon, everyone could go nomadic without having to use general-purpose hubs for their clones.

But getting them from something as dead-simple as 𝕏 to the Leatherman of Fediverse projects is difficult, to say the least. Even from Facebook.

And private persons will only really tackle Hubzilla and stick with it if they're geeks enough.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Lemmy #kbin #/kbin #Pixelfed #PeerTube #BookWyrm #Friendica #Hubzilla #FediverseMigration