Fediverse
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
So I was correct. Thanks!
They already know, it's just fediverse developers are radically anit-VC so reject any offers out of principle.
That's great!
I'm not a developer either, so take this as an observer's speculation.
My impression is that venture capitalists took a long look at the fediverse and chucked their money at Bluesky instead, because it actually works more similar to "ye olde" social networks — specifically with a business plan, road map and traditional organisational structure.
The parts of the fediverse that I am most inclined toward is too unruly, recalcitrant and noncommercial to attract deeper interest from VC investors. They are deliberately built and organised to resist expectancy of capital return on investments.
So my conclusion is the reverse of what you'd rather not discuss — in my eyes, the fediverse isn't very good for investors, because until now it's largely been grassrootsy. It will be interesting to see what VC-friendly platforms emerges in the vein of Bluesky or even Threads, and to what degree they will overlap with the current fediverse.
Instead of writing the same answer to all sceptics, I'll just write one answer here:
I believe that you greatly overestimate the rationality of VC at a micro level and greatly underestimate the number of business cases that can be made on top of popular open standards. Developing a fediverse software like Pixelfed is basically free if you're with the big money. The question is if it will hurt your other investments and strategy. Right now it looks like the answer is "no". The risk of putting too many eggs in the oligarch basket seems quite high.
Is it not possible to make money of the internet because you don't own the infrastructure and the standards are open?
How would you make money if you can't control the platform? Investing in the fediverse is a terrible investment case.
How can you make money of the internet if you don't own all infrastructure and control all standards? I promise, there are countless businesses cases.
There is a non-negligible amount of companies making money out of services based on email, even though they don't own email as a standard.
Also, remember when VCs were giving money to every "Uber for X" pitch deck some years ago? If ActivityPub ever manages to cement itself as ubiquitous standard, you can bet that we'll see investors going after anyone saying "LinkedIn, but on ActivityPub", "Tinder, but on ActivityPub", "Etsy, but on ActivityPub", "Patreon, but on ActivityPub", "Yelp, but on ActivityPub", "Github, but on ActivityPub"...
Exactly. And there are countless of popular open source projects which are funded by VC. Many of which I have no idea how they plan to make money. Astral (the creator of ruff and uv) is one recent example.
Just say that you use Rust and AI, and the VC will come.
Many of which I have no idea how they plan to make money. Astral (the creator of ruff and uv) is one recent example.
We are getting off-topic, but to me it seems clear that they are trying to become to the Python world what npm became to Javascript?
Yeah, maybe that was a bad example. I believe my point is that if the quality of the product and/or the number of users is large enough, it doesn't matter if you don't have a viable business plan yet.
The big risk when it comes to the fediverse is that it still is so small that big tech could just highjack the whole thing, and it wouldn't even be a bullet on the weekly board agenda. I.e. it's still pocket money we're taking about.
You can control the platform, so long as "the platform" means only your own instance. I have tabs open right now to both reddit.com and discuss.tchncs.de and the only difference as far as "control" is concerned is that here I can read posts by users, and from communities, that are registered elsewhere than discuss.tchncs.de too, the operators of the latter still otherwise have the same "control" as those as of reddit.
Hm, they have control over the instance but not directly (except if they fork etc) over the software? So comparing to reddit they can't modify the UI to include ads, can't inject tracking, etc.
Venture Capital already knows about the Fediverse. The problem is that VCs are actually terrible at taking risks and they will only invest on things once "the market" started paying attention to it.
I’d have thought VC would want to destroy rather than develop the fediverse?
No. It's quite easy to paint venture capitalists as these cartoonish evil entities that are plotting together against anything that might come to disrupt the status quo, but the reality is that the is no single entity out there coordinating their work. "Venture capitalists" are just a disparate number of people, all of them acting in their own self-interest, and if any of them sees the opportunity for themselves to make money on something, they will do it.
True that. Moneys money.
As far as I know some German states have started tinkering with the Fediverse and invest money in independant and souvereign solutions. At the same time some funds that were previously allocated to open source project funding have been re-allocated to AI and the future of funds like NLnet is uncertain. I see both demand and people trying things. But not a good and coordinated strategy. And it's been that way for some time now. We've seen efforts to move away from Microsoft, closed solutions... Opposition, technical failures and lobbying from big tech (who got money to advertise for their solutions). It's been a mixed bag. But in some niches it's become better. And things happen. I think in the near future we'll see some payoff from already started smaller projects. I don't really see a big change witing one year, but you never know. Plus we still need to find out where the situation with Bluesky and Elon Musk leads, that certainly got things rolling within a short timeframe.
I doubt venture capital is going to take interest, though. I don't think there's money to be made with the Fediverse. I mean it kind of goes against the business model. Unless you lock in people to your website, you can't display ads to your users. And it goes without saying, that all new platforms are shiny and welcoming at first. They might even advertise with freedom and federation to attract users. Still, they're free to not follow up with their promises, or add enshittification later on. And it's a different question whether platforms like Bluesky stay like that in the long term. Usually once venture capital gets involved, they add stuff that goes against the interests of their users and switch to acommodate for the advertisers.
Facebook's Threads already exists, so I guess they discovered it last year
In theory there's no overlap and so it's immune from VC capture.
Corporate social media is proprietary software (mobile and web apps) piggybacking on open internet standards (DNS, HTTP). Capital investment and financial returns are key.
Federated social media is open-source software and (I certainly hope, one day) newly developed open standards and open protocols. Community participation and state regulation are key.