Today, someone said, "Decentralized social media is a failure because technology like IRC lacks marketshare."
Sorry, stop the bus!
Why is marketshare the key metric here -- and not persistence and longevity?
I've been using IRC for nearly 30 years. It still works.
How long will WhatsApp work? I don't know -- only for as long as WhatsApp serves Meta's bottom line.
If we measure by persistence and longevity, IRC is a huge success!
From a user perspective, why does marketshare matter?
It mostly doesn't.
Obviously, size of network effect matters, but that's not the same as marketshare.
Even considering size of network effect, what's more important is *who* is using the network.
What matters most is whether a tool allows me to talk to the people I'm wanting to reach.
If a social media service only has 10 users but each of those 10 users affects my life in monumental ways, I will use it regardless of marketshare.
Yes, proprietary social media has marketshare. We agree on that. But here's my question.
Between Twitter, post.news, and the Fediverse -- which of these services is going to have the most persistence and longevity?
I don't know if Twitter's going to be available tomorrow. They could be removed from the Apple app store tomorrow.
Post.news is very likely to become the next Color or Ello or Parler.
The Fediverse? Yeah, it will be here for decades.
Facebook has 2.5 billion active users.
Twitter has 340 million active users.
Regardless of network effect, I use neither of those services (for wildly different reasons).
Thus, if someone *really* wants to talk to me on social media -- and it's absolutely critical -- they will probably need a Fediverse account.
As far as I'm concerned, I don't care how many people use Facebook or Twitter.
What I care about is what I can use indefinitely.
I acknowledge that I'm an atypical social media user. What I value in a social network is wildly different from most people.
My motive isn't to talk to everyone.
What actually motivates me is the ability to:
1. Own my personal data
2. Run my own services
3. Build my own tools
4. Define my personal space
5. Say things in a transparent environment
Neither Twitter nor Facebook can give me those things -- hence why I'm here on the Fediverse.
When considering *my* reasons for using social media -- not necessarily yours -- it should be obvious why I prefer the Fediverse over Twitter.
I cannot exist on Twitter, but I can exist on the Fediverse.
It doesn't matter if I can talk to everyone. The fact is that I can talk.
And not only talk, but talk indefinitely 🙂
@atomicpoet Facebook felt this way at the beginning. It provided me with more visibility to distant friends and a better chance to speak to them than I had without it. But we were young and naive and didn't think about data ownership and now we drown in advertising and lose friends to the algorithm.
Twitter let me hear from people whose voices I wanted to hear, but only, it seems, temporarily.
Now on Mastadon I have already had more meaningful 2-way conversations with people I want to hear from than I ever did on Twitter. I haven't yet found my IRL friends here yet, so that's a remaining hole.
@AnthonyUplandpoetWatkins Yep, and I don't care if people know me. I don't care if people talk to me. I don't even care if you acknowledge my existence.
All I want is to exist, to create, and to send stuff into the ether.
@AnthonyUplandpoetWatkins So consider: 1 year ago, I had 15 followers. I wrote about exactly the same thing I wrote about now. Most of the time, nobody talked to me, and if I got a response back -- hey cool, another human exists!
And now a lot of people follow me. For what reason, I don't know.
People talk back. For what reasons, I don't know.
I'm just going to talk because this is where I sort out my thoughts.
@atomicpoet I wrestle with this sort of thing from time to time.
I'd do what I do without followers, thanks to my intrinsic motivations.
But then again I don't post to my blog much in recent years because I don't get much interaction there these days. I still write, but I don't post it much of anywhere.
Not chasing lots of followers, but still looking for a bit of interchange with shared things
@atomicpoet I see some people already swooning over https://cohost.co with their 'edgy' corp talk. You know, "They seem like a cool bunch".
Users don't realize that 'investors' want a return of money and one way or the other they will sell out - they always do.
@NorthEastOne @atomicpoet The sell-out happens at least when expanding userbase really ramps up the server costs or someone gets the brainstem-rotting idea of going public.
And yea, going public may be a good way to get extra money to scale up, but doing that you can forget whatever grand visions you had: then your ass belongs to the market.
@NorthEastOne "...there are experts out there with a 'model'..." - Most popular economic theoriesI know approach from individual survival or resource scarcity perspective attempting to either explain/justify exploitation or introduce means to control such exploitation. It's all for the benefit of the stakeholders tho.
If there's a model in a way you outlined, I haven't come across one yet, but I'll certainly look for such - somone must've tackled the subject before
@edoswald The size of network effect is not the same as market share.
Here's my question. If one service is used by 20 million people and another service is used by 1,000 people, what has the bigger market share?
Obviously, the one with 20 million users.
Now, what if the service used by 20 million people is proprietary? And what if that service used by 1,000 actually has a network effect of 1 billion people due to its use of an open protocol?
Now marketshare doesn't matter as much.
@atomicpoet there is FreeNode IRC (most used by open source community) whose owner is moving it somewhere weird.
I think it was about free speech and monetisation. I forgot.
@atomicpoet @ariadne Large community exodus (from Twitter) is not the first time.
> In May of 2021, the Freenode IRC server was sold by the former head of Freenode staff. As a result many of the staff members of the Freenode service have resigned, citing the acquisition as a "hostile takeover."
> As a result, many communities formerly hosted on Freenode have migrated to Libera.chat.
https://www.drupal.org/community/contributor-guide/reference-information/talk/tools/irc-historical
Important Update about Freenode vs Libera In May of 2021, the Freenode IRC server was sold by the former head of Freenode staff. As a result many of the staff members of the Freenode service have resigned, citing the acquisition as a "hostile takeover." As a result, many communities formerly hosted on Freenode have migrated to Libera.chat.
@atomicpoet Look at what happened to AOL Instant Messenger. One day, AOL's current ownership decided it no longer suited their interests, and boom, there went the dynamite. Same for previous incarnations of Microsoft messaging products: MSN Messenger, which morphed into something else before being dropped in favor of Skype (which they bought).
Unfortunately the corporate world is full of marketing/advertising people who only know that language. (cont.)
@atomicpoet Yeah of course if you define your success criteria the way it suits your needs best, anything can be successful.
Sorry but privative social media has been transformative for billions of people, and IRC is still in use by ~10 000 nerds being extremely generous.
@atomicpoet market share matters when your goal is profit / serving shareholders.
Public-good is an unfamiliar goal in many circles, and they don’t grasp how to measure that. But it doesn’t need to be measured. Public good systems can exist for the sake of existing so long as they’re getting enough support to sustain themselves and that is the *only* measure that really counts.
If enough people chip in to the maintenance costs then it’s valuable enough to those folk to keep going.
@atomicpoet Email : Still going strong after more than half a century.
Fun fact : The first email was sent two years before FedEx was founded.
@atomicpoet What you're saying holds true for decentralized networks, however things like the Freenode debacle (or basically everything else from the history of IRC) shows how not-really-decentralized IRC is.
Decentralized networks like the Fediverse or Matrix are the ones that literally can't be bought or taken down like that, whereas IRC networks require everyone to do a coordinated move over to a different platform (sorry, IRC network) when a bad actor takes over the one you're on.
@vurpo @atomicpoet I might be wrong but I have a little bit of doubt over fediverse projects not being able to be bought. I have been trying to find a definite answer.
Comes down to the specific license of the fediverse project. Mastodon itself is safe from relicensing because of GPLv3 giving "irrevocable copyright" to users and requiring sublicenses to be GPLv3 as well.
What about other fediverse projects? Are there any without "irrevocable copyright", having the ability to change license?
@pekkasipila I mean specifically that the network, that has the people and communities in it, can't be owned. Software projects can be owned of course, but networks like the fediverse or matrix are defined by their protocols and not a specific software project.
See for example: Twitter or Freenode. Someone can come in and suddenly own the whole thing, and moving away from their control takes a lot of effort. But if you bought mastodon.social for example you still wouldn't control the fediverse.
@vurpo Good points, thank you for explaining.
I guess the ownership of the protocol itself is in safe hands at W3C for ActivityPub. Not sure though what would happen under state export controls if ActivityPub now or in the future involves for example US patents. I hope this doesn't sound like fearmongering.
How high can the switching costs from one Mastodon instance get to another? Do you need to start from literal zero on another fediverse instance/project if the owner prevents moving data?
@atomicpoet All I want is for the chat channel I'm in to not be under the control of a benevolent dictator of the chat network. On Freenode everyone was forced to abandon the channels they had and set up new ones elsewhere, but for example Matrix isn't like that.
An analogy is the web: the web is decentralized but it contains silos that are hard to get out of. For the decentralization to really matter, the thing built on the web also itself needs to be decentralized (for example ActivityPub).
@vurpo I don't want a dictator at all. If I had my way, most services would be as P2P as possible, and servers would only be used as a necessary evil.
The way I see it, however data is organized is a reflection of how people are organized.
Quite frankly, any system where privileges are unequal results in inequality itself.
Nevertheless, I also acknowledge there's degrees to this kind of stuff. IRC may not be entirely fair, but it's more fair than Discord.
@atomicpoet IRC is also the backbone of Twitch’s chat since it… works. XMPP is the backbone for stuff from Grindr to Cisco’s messaging solutions. Just because they fell out of popularity with end users doesn’t mean that they aren’t still valid solutions for lots of problems that lots of people use every day.
Long after the dust settles, and the VC money has run dry these are the protocols that will still be around for us to use.
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