Growing the fediverse by growing Mastodon

Like many others, I want to fix social media by growing the fediverse. To work towards this, what actions are best right now? One could go broad, helping multiple fediverse platforms to grow; or go narrow, supporting the dominant one.

My working theory is that the best path for now is to focus on growing Mastodon, because the world has provided it with key tailwinds of brand awareness and Twitter refugees. I hope this doesn’t dishearten other fediverse builders, because their work is also important for long-term success.

Here are my current thoughts, and I welcome anyone pointing out what better methods to grow the fediverse might be available.

Summary hypothesis

To scale a new social media service, you need:

1. Some experience that’s 10x better than available anywhere else

OR both of:

2. A large base of users with a desire to replace an existing service, and

3. Enough awareness to drive large-scale community adoption.

The fediverse doesn’t yet have #1, so we need to work with #2 and #3.

More detail

1. 10x better experience

I hope and believe that the fediverse will achieve this. The opportunities created by interoperability are so large, and the world has so many innovative developers, that great things are almost inevitable. But it’s not there yet. No fediverse service is 10x better than its centralized peer, nor has anyone yet invented amazing experiences that are uniquely fediverse-enabled. (A small handful of users so value decentralization and privacy that the 10x already exists for them. They’re already in the fediverse.)

It would be great if more product designers were working on inventing these 10x better experiences. Reach out to me if you want to do or support that work.

2. Awareness

Mastodon is the fediverse microblogging platform that got a ton of earned media. It doesn’t matter whether that was “fair,” i.e. driven by Mastodon being better than others.

Some other federated platform could maybe generate as much attention, but that would be a heavy lift. All else equal, it’s easier to row with the current than against it.

Public awareness is far from sufficient to scale a new social media platform (just ask Google+). But for people to join a service, they do need to hear about it — ideally many times.

3. Users motivated to switch

There is a large group of users who want to get off Twitter, which isn’t the case for any of the other centralized services. Until October 2022 the centralized platforms were acceptable to most people. But the Musk takeover created a novel opportunity by making Twitter inhospitable to several important stakeholder groups:

1. Journalists
2. The broad left-of-center coalition (elected officials, professionals, and activists)
3. Software developers

Developers aren’t a large user group, but are important because they are quickly improving the Mastodon experience.

Important constraint: Timing

This opportunity to grow the fediverse is time-limited for several reasons, including:

1. User motivation to switch may dissipate.
2. The world’s attention doesn’t last. Engineers (including many laid off from tech companies), funders, and others are thinking hard about the fediverse right now. Without traction, that attention will shift to other worthy areas.
3. The world is coming. If we don’t grow the fediverse that we want, someone else will grow a fediverse that they want. (Meta, Substack, whomever.)
4. It’s hard to grow a social network slowly. A trickle of individuals joining will all find an empty room and leave, so the most likely outcomes are rapid growth or stagnation.

In this scarce window, we have limited resources for growing the fediverse, so we have to decide how to allocate those resources across platforms.

I think the fastest way to grow all fediverse services is, for now, to apply resources ~entirely to growing Mastodon. I am thrilled that non-Mastodon platforms exist and I believe that they will ultimately be crucial to making the fediverse 10x better than centralized social. But non-Mastodon platforms don’t have any of the three ingredients listed at the very beginning; therefore I don’t see how to grow them quickly right now.

Conclusion

So the most feasible growth path seems to me:

1. Have Mastodon reach sustainable large scale (even with our full efforts, that’s far from certain).

2. That larger user base will: (a) Attract innovation that makes the fediverse 10x better (probably by mixing platforms), and (b) sign up for other existing federated platforms.

If we don’t seize this moment to scale Mastodon, then we may never get to the second step. In that case, the whole fediverse will miss this opportunity, and centralized social will maintain its dominance.