Chances for the fediverse? Elon Musk takes hit as Europeans ditch X in droves
Elon Musk takes hit as Europeans ditch X in droves – POLITICO
cross-posted from: https://europe.pub/post/372863
cross-posted from: https://metawire.eu/post/61363
The right-wing billionaire’s platform has recently lost about 10 percent of its European user base.
They're all going to bluesky because for some reason as soon as social media gets involved, the wonderful human ability to pattern match just gets switched off.
A lot of our biggest communities still have like two mods taking care of everything and are prone to cherry picking. It‘s the same old forum structures where the internet bubble effect is just as strong if not stronger than on larger, already problematic platforms. Some of the things I‘ve seen and experienced lately bring back memories from those internet forum days. Good ones but also the worst ones. And I have to admit it makes me doubt the Fediverse is actually scalable. There‘s just a lack of accountability in the end.
Which is not to say a federalized platform isn‘t an alternative to giant corporations. Those have their own problems and fair share of fuck ups. But I think I‘m already starting to see the limits of the Fediverse. At least in it‘s current stage.
The fediverse is much more than just lemmy. That being said i also disagree for lemmy. Drama between mods and communities was a regular thing on reddit. Still reddit managed to grow quite big before the bots took over. And companies are in no way more accountable to the users. Look at what happened with twitter under Musk. The only realistic choice you have as a normal user is to leave. And in the fediverse leaving a shitty instance still allows you to connect with all the other content from a different instance.
The fediverse is about options. If you don't like how someone else runs their platform or community you can create your own. It's awesome because you don't get locked into one platform. And in the future I think we will see more big companies and organisations running their own stuff. But I agree that at the moment it is not what "normal people" are looking for and it will take quite some time until it develops. But to be fair the same was the case for reddit.
I guess there is a hope that if more people join the Fediverse existing instances and communities won‘t just become more bloated but people create their own alternatives. However I have to say that I have no interest in running one myself. I‘m mostly here to discuss things that pique my interest. Running a community just isn‘t what I‘m here for and I‘m afraid too many people are just like me in that regard and we‘ll create an environment that‘s all too similar to Reddit.
I also don‘t think it‘s good for the platform when people leave a community with a grudge to create a competition „with blackjack and hookers“ style. I want people to come and just create communities because they want to. That‘s where I see a future for the Fediverse.
But I also wouldn‘t want to subscribe to 5 communities about the exact same topic because that would just spam my feed with the same threads probably. However I would actually like to hop between them easily so I don‘t stick around the same few people or have to abandon one for another. A lot would have to change about the way we interact with the platform (UI) and how it‘s connected for this to work though. I‘m thinking about subscribing to topics and it shows you a good mix of communities where overlapping threads are kind of stacked or something and you could swipe cards to see comments from different communities about it or something. This is a tough one to figure out. Might not even be possible at all.
Could you elaborate on the scalability problems of the fediverse in comparison to corporation owned platforms?
I fear communities are lacking resources and structure to handle the masses. It‘s something corporations already struggle with but they house like 10000 times more active users. One way to go around that was mentioned above and suggested that new users may keep creating new instances and communities so a few places don‘t just explode in size. But from my experience, if a community already covers a topic, there won‘t be much competition and we end up with a power mod environment (Reddit) at best and instances going dark from overload (hug of death) at worst.
But I don‘t want to sound too bleak about all of this. In the end these are challenges that someone might already work on.
More people = more people that can moderate
Europeans don't like Nazis.
Americans, well...
The Americans inspired them after all.
AfD Is Now Germany’s Most Popular Party For The First Time Ever.
I wish the 'Europeans don’t like Nazis.', would be true, but we maybe just lagging behind.
Europeans don't like Nazis.
I wish this was true.
Greetings from Austria, where a far right party is the strongest, although not ruling (yet)
Couldn’t happen to a nicer piece of shit.
Where did you read that? 80% would be insane if true
how can you respond to my deleted comment. I instantly deleted it after seeing a comment where I could add the same message under, so the discussion is more bundled
either way
funk's german post referenced this Imperva Bad Bot Report 2024
EDIT 74% not 80%, doesnt change anything tbh :D
Anecdotally, I watch reels on Instagram (i know) and the vast majority of meme pages that it shows me are the exact same setup around a slightly different premise, with the same purchased comments pinned from the same accounts or the accounts comment saying something like they're too broke for paid comments please like.
80% is probably high but I wouldn't be that surprised.
Don't go to BlueSky !!! They're not better than X. They obey to the same leaders... MONEY, GREED, AND POWER. A few weeks ago they restricted 72 Turkish protesters the access to their BlueSky accounts on simple request of the Turkish Government. So, BlueSky cannot be trusted they will secure the accounts of their customers. If Trump would ask BlueSky to block all accounts of members who are against him, they'll do it right away.
BlueSky may not be ideal, but anything is better than X.
X is just a machine for turning billionaire cash into political domination.
bluesky is just early twitter, and it wont stay that way for long. they've already removed people from there that the Turkish govt doesn't like and there is nothing at all stopping some billionaire like musk from swooping in and buying it all up.
The right-wing billionaire’s platform has recently lost about 10 percent of its European user base.
It's a good start but we gotta pump those numbers up.
remember 80% of instagram is bots according to a study reported by german media.
so X id even say it could be more giving the vast hatred increase and content change over the last years. so basically they lost 90%
EDIT/additional bit: funk's german post referenced this Imperva Bad Bot Report 2024
The rest are bots and Russian troll farms.
Let me guess, they're moving to Bluesky?
I tried moving to Mastadon first a few years ago and it was a pretty shit experience, Bluesky however has stuck in my app rotation pretty well.
Because Bluesky is centralised. You went from one serial killer's house to another. You don't know which serial killer owns your new house, but you're hoping they'll be nicer than the previous one. But at least their house is nearly as nice as the old serial killer's house.
General advice regarding open source: even if you tried something out years ago and didn't like it, it may be well worth giving it another shot. Open source projects often need some time to mature and take their time to improve, but only get better over time.
That's were the marketing dollars are
Ayyy, gotta have that monaaaay!
Or meta because its better? Like getting run over by a small car instead of a bus.
It's not just X; American social media has been gradually turning into such a shit show for the last 10 years: censorship, misinformation, consensus manufacture and creeping enshitification. I jumped ship to the fediverse and never looked back!
Abandon anything this Nazi touches.
I forgot that people are still using Twitter. WTF!?
They are not - he X/cancelled it.:-P
What about his children that hate him but are still his children?
He's gonna keep pumping them out till one of them likes him.
What's the quality like of the people who are still on Twitter in 2025? Does the fediverse want them? (These are real questions, I have no idea if there's still any decent people on Twitter.)
Every massive influx from Twitter has brought a deluge of people I want nothing to do with in any way shape or form, and a small sprinkling of cool ones. Fortunately like 4/5ths of the crappy ones leave again, but that other 1/5th is a big number when you're talking an influx of hundreds of thousands.
ik some good people that are still there because some of their friends are.
There likely are (I quit Twitter over a year ago), just because it does unique coverage on many topics.
It is humanities responsibility to make the rest of this man’s life miserable
I mean, Mastodon is German, so they're probably moving here. The federated fork of Dorsey's Twitter is second.
BlueSky is not federated. Also German users have outsized representation on Mastodon but most of the network is outside Germany.
"federated"
There is always that one comment saying "b-but its technically kinda federated". It doesnt fucking matter if its federated if 99.999% if all users are on one instance. The entire concept of a long lived, enshittification resistant fediverse relies entirely on being decentralized with a reasonably evenly distributed userbase. You fucking bet lemmy would already be completely worthless right now if people hadnt stopped lemmy.world from grabbing more communities and users.
Small chances for now, but let's keep growing small communities here. People need to get tired of Instagram and centralized algorithms to switch to fediverse
I try to convince people to do “+1”. Like, keep X/insta/reddit or whatever, but every time you feel you have something to post, do the same at mastodon/pixelfed/lemmy. Those platforms are nothing without the network effects, and the network effects will diminish the more people do this.
I'd love it if the fediverse could have its own algoithms as long as theyre open sourced and made ethically, like they shouldn't mess with peoples mental health or cause social media addictions
Yes. People don't realize algorithms are one of the main reasons decentralized sited haven't taken off. Most people don't want to spend time looking for their content, they just want to log in, laugh at funny memes and look at pretty art
Might have to also let people know the Fediverse exists?
Europe doesnt want federated services, they want censorship.
Saying that oil production lowers emissions by displacing coal will be called climate misinformation, saying immigration needs to be lower due to a housing crisis will be called hate speech, using Bitcoin instead of the digital euro will be called terrorist financing. They're already arresting people who do something as benign as retweet things, its a slippery slope.
Christ, this is such a stupid take. You'd think that someone who was around on the fediverse would have an inkling about just how many instances are based in the EU and Germany in particular.
Just because a country or userbase wants a degree of moderation and accountability, and doesn't tolerate hate speech, doesn't mean that views are censored. Basic Popperism stuff right there.
Meanwhile, in reality, the EU funds lemmy's development.
saying immigration needs to be lower due to a housing crisis will be called hate speech
Yeah, that's kinda hateful. True, it really would make things easier for EU citizens if less people were using the limited housing. But it would make things harder for the immigrants. Putting citizens over immigrants is... xenophobia.
Why waste the government's time solving the problem at poor people's expense, when the government could instead tax rich people more to pay for housing?
Putting citizens over non-citizens is called being a government.
Xenophobia is the irrational fear of foreign. And fear in this context usually shows up in the form of hate.
Putting citizens first does not mean hating the rest. Being a citizen of a country means that your government should represent you and your interests. It's only natural that it develops into benefits for citizens.
Xenophobia on a person level is when you see a person that you think is not part of your same origin, do you cross the street, or attack him or whatever. Of course this is not even close to being an exhaustive list.
Xenophobia on a country level is when you punish foreigners irrationally. Not letting foreigners into your country because you have a housing crisis is not irrational, it is a valid reason.
I find it hard to find examples of country-level xenophobia. Even if the act itself may seem xenophobic, the government may want to gain popular support of their xenophobic population, which would be a reason and thus non-xenophonic.
Of course, not being xenophobic does not mean it is good. For example Israel genociding Palestinians is horrible. But their reason is that having a neighbor that claims the same land as you do is problematic, and they figured if they just kill everyone the world will forget in 100-200 years (or less) while the land will be theirs for longer than that with no revels, since they genocided them. Of course, having a reason does not mean that it's not many other bad things (in this case, genocidal, which is worse than xenophobic).
If you had a zoo would you continue bringing in animals if they had no space left to live comfortably?
Likely you would call that inhumane, you wouldnt say they were being intolerant of the new animals if they did not.
Have you been to Europe? They have “walking” cities. You really don’t need a car to get around. My kids backpacked through Europe. The furthest they had to travel from a hostel was outside Amsterdam. 8 km on bicycles! My son just came back from Japan (I know, not Europe). He talked a lot about the “Shinkansen”. A high speed train that travels 280 km/h. They were able to travel all over Japan “without” a car.
As a Dutchman, I agree we have great infrastructure and "walking" cities. But you've only seen Amsterdam. Outside of the cities, The Netherlands is more dependent on cars than you might think. I live on the border of the country and public transport is basically non existent and cycling is not viable due to travel distances, every adult has a car in my area. A family of 4 adults (children over 18 living at home) have 4 cars parked in front of their house here. We're not as car dependent as the US, but we don't live in a fairytale either.
Try to go to an anti-genocide protest in EU and see how fast you get violently beat up, arrested or get cops at your door to have "a chat". All tose things in Amsterdam you mentioned too.
Oh boy...
Arresting people for retweeting? Really? Can you provide a source?
Too true. EC's constant attacks on encryption is worrying to say the least. I hope nothing goes thru.
Those are rookie numbers, euros, get on that shit.
Read an interview with a youth researcher that said, he does not see a problem with the content moderation (regarding extremism) because young people are anyway not interested in the disussions on there because its only for porn...
twitter was used for Porn for most users, after the tumblr purge they all moved to twitter, or peopel curious about porn actors.