this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
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"Our"?
What "our" is that? Who's "we"?
I mean, I've been around a while, so it can't be "us Fedi dwellers", since... you know, I'm pat of that, so I would be part of the "we", so surely you meant something else, right?
Because man, would it be some weird self-defeating irony to imply that in a thread where one is defending a mostly vibes-based argument that the culture in "our" place is actually uniquely diverse and free-form due to the way the thing is designed. That'd be a remarkable self-own.
So I'm sure it's not what you meant.
Look, deal with it however you need, I don't particularly mind, but it's one of many self-serving, semi-deliberate misaprehensions people around here like to lean on to dismiss the current limitations of Fedi's setup, and that habit does bum me out. Because, you know, being part of this community, despite your implications, I would like for it to be more popular than it is. Not fully mainstream, perhaps, because I do like the weird, cozy mid-90s forum feel of the thing, but... yeah, a bit.
And definitely I would have liked to see Masto put up more of a fight instead of being steamrolled by Elon. That was a legitimate bummer.
Did I ever claim to be trying to do that? I mean, it's starting to get convoluted, but my initial point was that people attribute effects to decentralization it doesn't have by itself, so the differences between the more consolidated Bluesky ecosystem and the less consolidated Masto ecosystem in particular aren't as meaningful as the graph in the OP suggests.
You were the one who popped up to claim that decentralization prevents monocultures. I just disagreed with that statement and pointed out that... yeah, that's one of the magic effects people claim that don't seem to really happen.
Whether that's a problem or how big of one is entirely up for debate. All I'm saying is it's not much of a real advantage, as far as I can tell. I'm both here and in BS, so I clearly don't find either that effect or the lack of that effect to be a dealbreaker, if it exists at all. I'm claiming it doesn't exist in the first place.
My educated guess is that what would meaningfully change how this conversation is playing out is me unequivocally siding with the home team and bashing the away team. The fact that I'm not necessarily bashing either (or at times I'm bashing both) is perceived as hostility or siding with the away team, because people have squishy brains and that's how the Internet works and all social media was a mistake.
Hah. That is a shockingly... optimistic? take in a world where even Twitter didn't crash and burn. I would ask how resilient that level of delusion is to observable reality, but refer to my earlier comments about social media and squishy brains.
I mean, it's not, though. Things either happen or they don't. You made a prediction that does not match reality.
That's... entirely delusional. Every stat I can find shows Twitter running pretty much flat since the whole mess started. It's an order of magnitude larger than Bluesky (which itself seems to be down 15-25% this year) and two orders of magnitude larger than Masto, which is also flat YoY.
There is zero indication that Twitter is declining further and certainly if it is at all those users aren't going to Fedi, BS or any other federated networks. Even if you believe that most of it is bots now it's still bigger even discounting that, by most estimations, and it's not shedding either users or bots towards decentralized networks.
At some point wishful thinking stops being optimism, you know?
How is it a dreamscape? I don't like it. I don't want it to be that way. It's just... what reality seems to be based on every piece of information we can get from it. Time is moving things in the opposite direction you're hoping for.
I mean... yeah, I do have ways to verify them. For one thing I can get more than one source, which I did. For another this is not data pulled out of thin air, there are multiple proxies for web traffic. It's not like we've built a entire worldwide economy of advertising and attention without any tools to get at least some notion of how may people are putting that attention where.
Is the Twitter brand damaged? Certainly. I wouldn't touch it with a very long stick, myself.
So is Meta and Google and Apple. And yet, for as much as we are all aware that Meta actively participated in genocide and spied most of the planet illegally you know how their social media performs? Facebook is up to 3 billion users, Whatsapp is the default form of communications of big chunks of the planet, their social brands dominate social networking worldwide.
So hey, if you have some semblance of a timeline for when this social damage does anything practical I would appreciate a hint, because from down here in the real world it's not looking particularly likely any time soon.
See, you don't get to forecast the downfall of your political rivals on a limitless timeline. I am in agreement that Elon Musk will die sometime before the sun expands and engulfs the inner planets of the solar system, but that's not much of a realistic prediction of Twitter's performance in practical terms.
Yeah, that's what the word "proxy" means up there. I don't need to get any of this data from Twitter directly to know which direction the number is going and where it is relative to previous years. It's not moving the way you think it's moving. And the numbers work with any number of bots because the size differences are so big that even going with the larger estimates where 3/4 of all of the damn thing is all bots it's still several times larger than either BS or Masto, or even both put together.
Look, it's okay to live in a vibes-driven world, I suppose. I can't force you out of it. But maaaan, does it get in the way of having a normal conversation with someone else about a real thing that happens in the real world where we both need to agree on some semblance of reality.
I'm not even that angry that you are in denial about it, weirdly, but it's mildly alarming and it makes this entire conversation retroactively feel like a massive waste of time.