🚀 Here’s why the fediverse is the future of social networks, and the web - The Verge
Decentralizing social media can sound like a sort of kumbaya anti-capitalist manifesto: “It’s about openness and sharing, not capitalism, man!” In practice it’s the opposite: it’s a truly free market approach to social networking. Mastodon may not be interested in becoming a trillion-dollar company, but there’s no reason there can’t be plenty of those built on the fediverse. It’s just that in a fediverse-dominated world, the way to win is not to achieve excellent lock-in and network effects. The only way to win is to build the best product.
The best thing about the fediverse is that it will actually enable an explosion of better social products, for lots of reasons but one in particular: it allows for so many more of them. Forget the hand-wavy protocol stuff for a second — one of the best things about embracing ActivityPub is that it sticks a crowbar into a single Voltron-ic product like Facebook or Twitter or Snapchat and pries it apart into its component pieces, each one ripe for innovation and new ideas.
We’re still in the very early days of the fediverse, and it’s going to be messy for a while. It might feel like you’re seeing the same posts too many times, and like you see some posts that obviously weren’t meant to be seen in the app or feed you’re using. Some particularly thirsty influencers are going to go hard on cross-posting tools that threaten to clutter up all your feeds everywhere and become totally unavoidable. This is not a problem with the protocols; it’s an opportunity for better products. There’s plenty of money to be made in the fediverse, and plenty of space for new products to take off.
If 2023 was the year “fediverse” became a buzzword, 2024 will be the year it becomes an industry. (Hopefully one with a better name, but I’ll get over that.) We’ve spent too long living our lives online in someone else’s spaces. What’s next will belong to all of us. All that’s left to do is start posting.