It’s much lower friction to say: “Hey, add me on XYZ social media app”.

only because of network effects. People are used to ask you to add them on FB or IG because literally a third of the world have an account there. Now go around asking them to add you on friendica or movim, they will probably just give you a blank stare.

The problem is less about the chart and the fact that you are taking a jump from a very short interval and trying to pass it off as something completely unprecedented.

Getting called a liar and having people try to minimize a significant trend

“Lies, damn lies and statistics” is not about calling you a liar, but how people can selectively use different data points to present information that supports their thesis or confirms their biases. I wasn’t calling you a liar, I am just disagreeing with you about this being “significant”.

If this growth rate holds for the next two weeks, then I’ll gladly change my tune and start talking about a trend. But so emphatically making projections out of one or two data points is a fool’s errand.

Sorry, I think we were talking past each other.

When you were talking about “Matrix is not a good” , I was understanding that you meant that the protocol was not suitable for it. Now I see that your issue is not with matrix itself, but with its most popular clients, because none of them (unlike Futo circles) provide any sort of unified view of the different rooms.

I understand how it could be interesting to have this type of unified view if you really care about emulating “the Facebook experience”, and perhaps it wouldn’t be that difficult to implement that. In practice though, I think that you’d come up with the following conclusions:

• even if Futo Circles was still around, you’d still have a major challenge in convincing the people to create an account on a Matrix server.
• even if Futo Circles was still around, most people are not interested in getting all their social connections sorted in all these different buckets.
• even if Futo Circles was still around, you’d quickly realize that most people prefer the UX of separate group chats. There simply aren’t that many “circles” for most users. You’d have a circle for your close friends, another for work/school colleagues, another for some common activity like gym/chess/book club, maybe a bigger circle for your neighborhood, etc… so it doesn’t really provide a lot of helping when filtering things out in a timeline. The whole thing with “Circles” is interesting (and one of the most interesting features of Google+) but one of the reasons that Google+ failed was because and the UX of “browsing through the list of groups with new messages” is good enough for most people.

Reach out to @[email protected], the developer.

Ok, I don’t know how else to explain. What you are asking (“A public timeline that anyone can follow, except end-to-end encrypted”) is physically impossible.

Like, really impossible. See if you spot the issue:

they won’t see each other’s stuff, just mine and whoever else they add

The wide audience I’m talking about is all the people I add

How would keep a single timeline where the messages you sent are only visible to your friends, but not visible to your friends’ friends?

The answer is: you don’t. You can not do that. You need to have a separate room for the contacts that you want to make your pictures available. Your contacts need each to have their own room for the contacts that they need to have available.

I’m essentially proposing a mass e2ee encryption messaging service, with a UI that amalgamates it into a single feed

To view the feed, yes you can consolidate all posts into one single view. But when you post something, you will need to define which rooms will see the content, and the message will be duplicated across the different rooms. You can bet that Futo does not gets rid of this abstraction.

it’s “public” only to people you’ve added

Which means that you have a protected room!

You mentioned you are not a programmer, so maybe you are missing one key information: it only makes sense to talk about “end-to-end encryption” when the sender knows the recipient a priori. You can not simply broadcast a message to any unspecified “wide-audience” and have it “end-to-end encrypted”.

It’s not a group abstraction, at least for the user, since you’re not asking everyone to join the same group,

Yes, you are. If you want the messages to be e2ee encrypted and which can not be spied by the server owner, you are in effect asking people “come join me on this room where we will have a shared secret to exchange messages privately”.

I understand that you are thinking in terms of an unified view, but this is an UX matter. If you want only a selection of people to be able to decrypt your message, you will have to add them to a group that you will have to manage it, and Matrix/XMPP already provide these mechanisms.

And I’m saying that your “end-to-end encryption” and “public timeline” requirements are conflicting. If you want e2ee, you will have to manage the rooms yourself. You can bet that even if you tried the Futo Circles client, you would still have to manage “who-can-access-what”, which implies that the room/group abstraction is still there.

This is where going a group is not what I’m after, as that’s what Matrix would be good for.

A XMPP room and a Matrix group are equivalent. You can, e.g, create a room, set it to “private” and only add the people you want to see your content.

As a matter of fact, I think you could have what you want even with a basic matrix client. This is actually what I do with my family: I didn’t want to share pictures of my kids on Facebook, so I created a “Family” group and we use to talk and share pictures.

It’s built on XMPP. XMPP provides direct and group (room) communications. If you set up OMEMO, any message you send will be encrypted and only visible to the recipient(s).

What you are calling “timeline” is equivalent to what they are calling “blog”, the concept is the same: sorted feed of events which are published to network.

I’m surprised that you are ignoring the XMPP alternatives…

You are looking for https://movim.eu/

Yeah, my bad. But the emphasis should be on “slide back”, i.e, the derivative is negative.

ok, that’s a fair point. But then this whole talk about “going vertical” and “exponential growth” is useless, and the only thing that we could (perhaps) try to take out of these mass migration events is to ask ourselves “would we able to reduce churn in the Fediverse without compromising on any principles?”

In other worlds, does this mean that the only reason that the Fediverse is small is because it is not as addictive as the other social networks? Does this mean that leaving Instagram and coming to PixelFed is the same as quitting unhealthy ultraprocessed foods and realizing that when you switch to a healthy diet you simply don’t eat as much at all?

And if any of this is true, shouldn´t we change the effort from “leave Instagram and come to PixelFed” to “Leave Instagram and quit all social media”?

It’s not “again” for anything you’ve written in this comment thread.

Try the sibling: https://communick.news/comment/4203442

If it’s indeed a trend for Lemmy to have 200% yoy growth then yeah, I’d think that’d be pretty successful.

You got it exactly backwards. There is a decline trend (monthly users go down month after after a spike) while the “200% growth” is not determined by any curve and can not be measured by any specific interval, because it was driven by one stochastic event that brought 100k people out of a sudden (the Reddit migration)

To go back to my original comment: let’s see how the numbers are going to be in the next month. If the first derivative is still positive, then we can talk about “trends”, until then we are just senseless cheering and extrapolating out of one data point.

Again: “back to baseline” is not meant in absolute numbers, but trend-wise.

I’m sorry, I think I was looking at overall numbers and not just Mastodon. According to https://mastodon.fediverse.observer/stats&months=48, it seems Mastodon was at ~575k MAU before Musk, shot up to ~1.5M early 2023 and is now sitting around 800k.

I don’t mean that the numbers went exactly back where they were. I mean that every spike was followed by a steady decline.

Compare it with Bluesky now, or compare it with Reddit during Digg’s meltdown. Their growth curves will look like an S-curve, not this series of discrete jumps followed by 40-60% loss.

At first, it was only an app for PixelFed. But AFAIK, the developer got tired of waiting Daniel to implement some needed improvements on PixelFed’s API and decided to create his own backend.

Oh, wow, very impressive! Did you have to use a calculator to get to this challenging result?

Communick’s revenue grew 1800% in 2024, compared to 2023. Do you think that makes it successful in any way?

I am here since before the Reddit backout and I am on Mastodon since 2018. Lemmy was at 15k MAU, went up to over 125k and now is 1/3 of that. Mastodon had 1M 575k something before Elon, hit up close to 2M 1.5M and now is sitting around 800k. (edit: I was looking at the overall charts and used wrong figures. Corrected now.)

Sure, if your reference point is waaaay before the spikes then what we have now seem “a lot”. However, my point is that these spikes are far from being indicative of mass adoption.