There's no Mastodon slump.
Sign-ups continue to increase -- albeit, not at the same rate as in November -- November was a spike.
While Monthly Average Users (MAUs) decreased since November, it's increased again this month (according to @Gargron).
But what's more interesting is that Half Year Average Users (HYAUs) is at a peak.
And we're very close to breaking 1 billion posts per month!
See chart.
But this chart for Misskey is even more interesting to me. This is
Average Misskey Total Users by Month.
The growth is absurd -- and it has been validated by multiple sources.
Misskey is part of the Fediverse, and it talks to Mastodon.
The armchair pundits who talk on and on about Mastodon's non-existent "slump" -- which I've shown isn't happening in a previous chart -- aren't even considering the broader Fediverse.
Here's the Average Pixelfed Posts by Month.
Does this look like a slump to you?
The tech press would love Mastodon to fail and Bluesky to succeed.
Why? Because it fits very neatly into a pre-determined narrative.
Mastodon is supposedly made by a ragtag squad who flew too close to the sun.
And Bluesky is supposedly made by Silicon Valley—they’re supposed to win.
There’s nothing the tech press love more than an outcome that’s predetermined.
The tech press very much want to frame this as Mastodon vs. Bluesky.
But have they ever considered that if the protocol underlying Bluesky (AT protocol) ever took off, Mastodon could just use it—thereby talking to Bluesky?
It’s as though their narrative of “competition” doesn’t work in this situation!
Every app on the Fediverse could talk to Bluesky if they really wanted to, and Bluesky really was as decentralized as they say they want to be.
For example, look at Friendica. It uses at least four protocols to talk to other server software:
1. DRFN
2. Diaspora
3. OStatus
4. ActivityPub
In theory, adding AT protocol shouldn’t be a big deal—it’s open source.
The question is whether Bluesky actually wants to federate with other servers.
The real competition isn’t “Mastodon vs. Bluesky”.
It’s “ActivityPub protocol vs AT protocol”.
One is used by nearly 25,000 servers. The other is used by one server.
On a per node basis, which one do you think is winning?
@[email protected] Currently I would describe it as a walled garden who’s owners have publicly expressed the intent to tear down those walls.
@atomicpoet It was given a good for general public but what happened next is all that predictable as anything under capitalist control they privitized the whole network used for communication, privitized the open web with large corporate websites and pushing most independent websites run by people to obsecurity for the general masses. This in turn made the internet to concentrate its traffic to all but a tiny few big-corporate run websites.
2/
@atomicpoet This led to question for those in control of website how to monitize this new user base.So this led to there strategy of using the large quantity of data this provided them access to be sold as another commodity to whoever is willing to give them money.This in turn was a tresure well in reach for government agency who had now access to this tressure trove of data of million of people on open market without any oversight.Corporate web loved this and jumped on the wagen with other.
3/
@atomicpoet With the mainstream news being owned by the same class as the corporate-web owner, the rise of activitypub threathen the backbone of of these techbros and their giants as this make it possible for people to have an option other than corporate web. The rise of fediverse make the public confident in community run opeb source projects which in turn hurt the very bottom line of these tech giants.
4/
@atomicpoet
I think the AT protocol embodies several good ideas. And maybe some curious decisions.
IMHO the most likely scenario is this: Future versions of ActivityPub will contain some of the good ideas.
The two weak points of AT protocol seem to be the as-yet-undecided Distributed Identifiers (this is where I would start to ensure a walled garden, if I was a mean person) and the higher complexity of the implementation (but maybe it just looks that way to me).
@wakame @atomicpoet Well, we'll see once it's really tried and tested in a multi-server environment.
It is very easy to win in a race where your opponent is operating in a messy real-world environment, while you are only an idea written down on paper, only tested in a very clear and controlled space.
Build bridges. Build literal software bridges --> making ATProtocol just another arm that interoperates with the larger Fediverse. Same with Nostr.
Remember Adium? I need one of those for the seventeen microblog platforms.
@atomicpoet hello, asking a noob question, what kind of effort or what needs to happen for Bluesky and Mastodon to be linked?
For example, could some person running a Mastodon server just start doing it?
@atomicpoet tech media wants to keep writing about VC backed platforms because financing is more interesting to write about. It's why the Verge keeps writing fluff pieces like this for companies that offer no actual value https://www.theverge.com/23696466/bitcoin-crypto-lightning-network-lightspark-ceo-david-marcus
They'd rather keep writing about multi-million dollar startups because writing about contributor days and successful open source projects isn't going to drive the same pageviews.
#Nostr has bridged, well actually this history is a little mad, it was #truthsocial crew who wrote the code to bridge #Nostr to #Activertypub, you could not make this stuff up.
Bridges are need, we should piss on any new protocols that don't have at least one bridge to an existing #openweb protocol, and pissing is not just a metaphor, it helps to short out their servers.
#nothingnew is only half a metaphor :)
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