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RE: https://mementomori.social/@juergen_hubert/115332193669869104

To expand on my earlier post, I have frequently read the notion around here that the #Fediverse doesn't need to grow in order to be successful. I vehemently disagree.

Commercial social media either bends its knee to #fascism (e.g. #Meta and #TikTok ) or actively its influence to actively promote fascism (e.g. #X , and I have my suspicions about Meta as well). As we should all know by now, fascism is bad for marginalized groups, bad for democracies, bad for the environment, and bad for the planet as a whole.

Thus, to have a chance for the long-term survival of human civilization, we absolutely must replace commercial social media with something better. And right now, the Fediverse seems to be the best candidate we have for "something better". Thus, by making the Fediverse grow, we can help build a better world! Isn't that a worthy case we can all support?

Such growth will also allow us to support some legitimate use cases which currently cannot realistically be fulfilled by the Fediverse as it is:

1 Political activism. To really rally people to a good cause, you need to reach lots and lots of people - and that's difficult with the Fediverse's tiny, tiny user base. There is a reason most of the political activists - even those who are basically sympathetic to us as such - are still using Meta, TikTok, and even X for their work. These platforms are all deeply hostile to progressive causes, and they are _still_ more useful for progressive political activism than the Fediverse. Think about that.

2. Businesses. Most people use social media as a hobby, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Still, we live in a late-stage Capitalist hellscape, and we all need to make money somehow. And many small business owners use social media to make others aware of their work and products. If they cannot find enough customers via the Fediverse, then they will stick to Facebook et. al.

To make this clear, "supporting small business" in the Fediverse does _not_ mean you have to accept a deluge of ads in your stream, or next to it. All of this should be by consent only. But it is absolutely legitimate if companies want to open up an account and/or instance where they talk about their latest products (like, say, #ttrpg publishers) and where fans and customers can interact with them. And if doing this on the Fediverse is not worth the time and effort for them due to a lack of users, then they will stick to Facebook.

(Full disclosure: I, too, am doing a long-running experiment to see if using the Fediverse as my primary advertising environment is profitable. So far, I am earning €200/month - a nice side income, but far from enough to make a living off it.)

There are some further social media use cases which could be vastly improved by a larger Fediverse user base, although they would need new software as well:

3. Job and career networking similar to #LinkedIn
4. Crowdsourced Question and Answer systems like #Quora

and probably a few others I haven't thought of (do you have any further ides?). But either way, to my mind the positives of a growing Fediverse will far outweigh the negatives.

So what _can_ we do to expand the Fediverse? A good question - I have a few ideas, but what are your thoughts?