I’m amazed at how fast this place has grown since the first time I saw a Lemmy instance (way before Reddit API drama), or since the first time I snooked around Mastodon (before Twitter exodus) for that matter. So I guess I’m inherently optimistic by the fact that where newer users might see little activity as a bad sign, I see a little activity as a huge improvement on what the status quo was not so long ago.
On a technical side, open source projects also tend not to benefit from growing too fast. It seems to me Fediverse platforms currently have a healthy activity level for the stage of completion they are in. Lemmy certainly grew faster than it could handle for a while, and arguably Mastodon suffered from the same.
The main reason I’m hopeful about the social web is, however, that it makes no sense any more to create a new platform that does not support it. No matter what kind of social networking site you’re making, proprietary or open, you’re going to want to make it ActivityPub enabled, simply because it gives you a user base right off the bat.
And furthermore, it encourages the development of new platforms, precisely because you don’t need to establish yourself with a whole bunch of users. According to fedidb my platform of choice, PieFed, has 124 active users right now. It would not have been a very interesting corner of the old web.
I don’t think the established user base here is going anywere, and I think future developments will feed into the ecosystem. So I’m pretty hopeful. But it is going to take time before all sorts of niche communities have made themselves a federated home.
Bluesky and Threads will fight it out over microblogging, while Mastodon will stick around as a smaller less corporate alternative. A year from now people on both platforms can probably follow my Mastodon handle anyway, so I don’t really care all that much.
Very cool!
Do you be have any idea how tolling scraping these data is for the servers?
If this is something you want to keep working on, maybe it could be combined with a sort of Threadiverse fund raiser: we collectively gather funds to cover the cost of scraping (plus some for supporting the threadiverse, ideally), and once we reach the target you release the map based on the newest data and money is distributed proportionally to the different instances.
Maybe it’s a stupid idea, or maybe it would add too much pressure into the equation. But I think it could be fun! :)