Anil DashAt its peak, there were ~5000 developers building on the Ethereum blockchain, according to enthusiasts' own estimates, and this was easily the most popular platform for blockchain devs. By contrast, over in the fediverse, Mastodon *alone* has over 40k stars on GitHub (indicating individual devs who are following the project) and that's just one project within the overall explosion of innovation happening in every facet of the fediverse — without any crypto bribes or scams driving any of it.
Some would quibble with the stats that I'm comparing here, and that's fine and valid, but I will note that nobody replied with a correction on a blockchain-based platform. 😇
Marc Hedlund@anildash give it time, those transactions take a while to clear 😜
Harish Narayanan@anildash Nobody from that world is even here to defend the e.g. web3 case because it was never about decentralisation for them. Just a grift.
🇺🇦 Maksim Lin 💙@anildash Sheesh even if we agree with your premise and motives, backing it with completely bogus "metrics" is not a good look.
Glyph@anildash I was wondering if "github stars" and "developers building" were really comparable metrics, but, the story is pretty bad for blockchain even if you go apples to apples; only 19.5k stars on the Solidity repo
aburka 🫣@glyph @anildash Yeah no it has nothing to do with it; the sentiment here is fine but the comparison is completely meaningless. @anildash has strawmanned his own point, a gift to people who might try to say crypto skeptics use specious arguments. It's like saying that iOS is better than Android because there are more iPhone users than Google employees.
suldrew 🚲🏳️🌈@anildash you love to see it
Isaac Lyman@anildash I agree with the sentiment, but I don’t know that GitHub stars are a good proxy for developer engagement. In my experience there tends to be at least a 10-to-1 ratio of stars to active contributors
dorianlistens@anildash Not that I think GitHub stars are much of an indication of anything either way, but an extremely quick search leads me to https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum, which has 41.2K stars. I wouldn’t dispute that the fediverse seems to have had meaningfully more real-world impact, but this 5K vs 40K comparison doesn’t hold water.
@dorianlistens sure, then let's say they're merely even! still remarkable given *tens of billions* invested into crypto platforms.
@anildash Definitely!
Clueless by Sam@anildash @dorianlistens "invested" lifting a lot of weight there
@pikesley @dorianlistens I mean, this is the numbers from just one year https://fortune.com/2021/12/20/invstors-pour-record-money-cryptocurrency/
@anildash @dorianlistens lot of money went in sure, describing it as "investment" tends to imbue it with more dignity than it perhaps deserves
Bruce Elrick@anildash @dorianlistens Capitalist grift is about leverage!
Running a real system for serving real people (a small business or the collection of fediverse instances) is about earning gratification or an actual living on the margins of providing the service.
Orders of magnitude difference in "reward", one via exploitation, the other through honest work.
Micah
Fabrice Desré@anildash github stars are mostly the "+1" of github.
Mastodon has 6k forks which are a better indication of its active developer community (not counting other clients, bots etc. of course!)
Hupie
David Emmett@anildash never bet against people wanting to communicate. It is the most fundamental human need and desire
Arnan de Gans@anildash following is not the same as developing...
Bud Gibson@anildash I think developers see the fediverse as something directly relevant and useful to them.
Brian Dear@anildash I sure would love to find a good, comprehensive, accurate "What's Happening Across The Fediverse" article (WIRED? hello?) that goes into detail on all the kinds of applications, current developments, and expected build-out over the next few years, for those who, like me, haven't taken any time to learn more about it beyond Mastodon instances.
And along these lines, I would love to see the equivalent of a ProductHunt type of site that curates all the new Fediverse apps going live.
Evan B🥥ehs
@eb Thanks, appreciate it!
Tom Walker@anildash There's some poor soul out there who learned Solidity properly and now probably spends their days on AI 'prompt engineering'.
Mikko Alasaarela
Dave Pell
David L Schafer 🥭
J Λ M Ξ S@anildash had no idea ethereum had ~5000 developers building for it. with all the hype, I would've expected a lot more
I'm interested in sharing that stat! do you have a link to the source?
wujibear
Orc@anildash Okay. Now how many people are actually doing development on Mastodon (and derivatives)?
Github stars are likes, and unless those 40k people are actually contributing, they are a meaningless metric.
Dani (She/They)@anildash that’s very fair, although I have to assume that it’s easier to develop for mastodon than it is for blockchain?
Jason Miller 🦊⚛️@anildash REST APIs are the best APIs
Jovica Popovic@anildash
40k is about the same amount of stars go-ethereum (https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum, the reference implementation of Ethereum client). So not exactly sure the point you wanted to make actually stands.
40k is about the same amount of stars go-ethereum (https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum, the reference implementation of Ethereum client). So not exactly sure the point you wanted to make actually stands.
Yusef Napora@anildash who wouldn’t want to develop for a machine with the computing power of a timeshared Atari 2600 that charges $$$ for every CPU cycle?
seurimas@anildash Go Ethereum has 41.6k stars, and 16k forks to Mastodon's 6k forks. I'm optimistic for the development future of Mastodon, but it's unlikely to have surpassed the development of even just the one cryptocurrency mentioned, yet.
Edwin Smith@anildash I get the point but by using numbers that don’t add up to 20 seconds of checking and making poor equivalencies it fatally kills the argument.