The reason they don’t grow is much more trivial - they simply have no sign up funnels and are visibly technically complicated. Every step and choice there is arcane and ideologic.

That’s it. Both Open Source and Federated thinks that distribution gateway federation something is something a user must know and be fond of. The user not only couldn’t care less but actively refuses this complexity because they cannot trust their own uneducated decisions. They go for the nearest CorpThing that seemingly just works for everyone and decides everything for them after they tap “Next” a few times.

I changed phones, and tried to log back into my Fediverse/Mastadon accounts. The app asks me which servers I'm on—I can't find the accounts in my password manager, can't figure out which servers they were, and the ones I thought I was on maybe don't exist anymore? Or were accessible in one but not another app.

So I managed to log into one of the 3 accounts I'm sure that I have still. And I'm a software nerd who makes "educated" decisions all the time around this stuff.

Protocol People really care about that, and you know what? It becomes their network effect. But it is a self-selecting network. The nature or design of what effects and attracts the network is the same mechanism for limiting its size.

TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat all focus on things that other people really care about—namely video creation, photo curation and ephemeral small network cohesion. and those focuses attract other userbases.

Probably, there's a lot more people who want to create and watch short videos than there are people who want to nerd out over what their 1/10,000 servers' community rules and protocol settings are.

I've always feel like this is a fundamental weakness with these systems. They would do better having a monolithic namespace. Want the handle @jack? Too bad. Maybe it should be like a domain name you pay for but other than that I don't see a way for federated systems to get traction.

You are way too nice on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat. It's basically a giant narcissism enabler, just with different media.

The federated stuff is unsuccessful not just because of protocol stuff (if people really wanted, they would find a way) but because it's not cool yet.

The only reason people go on those networks is to try their luck at popularity and find a way to cash out in various manners. Other than that, there is not much point going on there, why would you waste time broadcasting all kinds of things you do instead of just doing more...

Which is related to the fact that OP doesn't understand that you can't fix a social and political problem with technology. Technology is always downstream of the establishment, whatever that looks like.

We only think of computing as "personal" at all because of that brief period in the 70s when very simple toy computers, just powerful enough to run a spreadsheet and play some basic games, became affordable.

But computing was invented to solve wartime problems of various kinds, including ballistic calculations, warhead design, cryptography, and intelligence analysis.

Almost immediately it moved into corporate accounting and reporting, and commercial science and engineering.

It took thirty years for it become "personal." Its roots are corporate and military, and it was never - ever - suddenly going to give those up.

Worse, a lot of open/free/etc "solutions" are built by people who like tinkering, for other people who like tinkering. That's fine when you're making an OS for a web server, but a disaster if you want technology that's open from the POV of the average non-technical user.

You can just about, now, start to imagine an anti=internet which is distributed, secure, non-corporate, and controlled by ordinary non-technical people telling smart agents what to do.

That might, just about, with many caveats (it's not hard to think of them), become a technological solution that builds a true decentralised network.

But for now we're stuck with corporate centralisation. And that's not going to be fixed by going back to 8-bit micros, or with a Linux phone.

I tried to install Element messenger and even asked several of my family members to install it for communication. With default server, it turned out to be extremely slow - like hours to send a small video. Looked into installing my own server, but the complexity scared me away, and I have 40 years of coding experience behind my belt. So we are back to whatsapp now.

I would disagree with the implication that everything has to grow, but solely on the grounds that I am not convinced human beings are psychologically mature enough as a species to be that connected with that many other humans and still retain their capacity for acting like a a good human.

The federated networks I am part of are pretty small and we have a lovely time sharing diverse interests, getting to know each other and even disagreeing sometimes without the blind hate, persistent negativity and gotch'a seeking you typically find on places like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. Too much growth too quickly would destroy that, turning those small federated networks into another cesspool of bad behavior.

However, I am open to hearing why people disagree. My personal experience drives my opinion, so ymmv.

I'm not sure what you mean by lacking a network effect, unless you mean they don't yet have sufficient users to draw in new ones?

I personally switched to Lemmy from Reddit after the API debacle, and I've found it to be an extremely compelling platform exactly -because it was federated. I can curate my feed from hundreds of large and small instances with nary a corporation in sight! It's self-hosting as far as the eye can see, yet it has enough interesting content and discussions to keep me coming back, without any ads or algorithm trying to manipulate me.

It feels like 90's internet full of webrings, and it's glorious.

Well yes and no. There's no existing network (for something new), so certainly there's no network effect making them grow.

On the other hand the pitch to get people to join is weak. I don't pitch it to my friends because (currently) its a pretty poor experience compared to what they are already using.

I don't think the fediverse experience is poor, I rate it as superior to the walled gardens.

I don't pitch it to my friends because quantity invariably destroy quality, or at the very lease hide it behind a huge pile of dirt. I don't pitch it because people who are interested in a better internet already care and know how to find it. I don't want to ruin a nice well behaving network.

wouldn't "growth" have to be reinterpreted for such technology? cause part of its appeal is to _not_ grow unchecked. you don't want everybody on there and you want the setup to be a little difficult. about as difficult as it was to hook up with the web in the 90s.

> They lack a network effect that makes them grow. Isn't lack of fast growth a good thing? I swear, I left every social network in the two years after my mom joined.

At some point of a network popularity, it feels like there is an influx of people who want to talk to you but lack reading comprehension to read your answers. Or maybe it's specifically that every "become popular fast" algorithm tries to repeatedly throw you to them.

Curating a corner of web for yourself takes time and effort, and if a social network popularity outpaces you, then you just can't do that.