There was a news item yesterday that "Mastodon" (aka Fedi) reached 2 million users recently. This is after a decade. Facebook's Thread came out a week ago and now has 100 million users.

One thing that this means is that for all the fears that Threads might embrace, extend and extinguish the Fediverse, they don't seem very likely: They haven't embraced it yet, they already have a much higher user count and they absolutely don't need another 100k user from the fediverse who hate their guts just to pump up their numbers. If they ever actually implement federation, it will only be for regulatory reasons.

Still, drama about Meta (and before, gab and truth social, and always twitter) filled up the net for weeks and months, and big 'pacts' were drawn up to fight against an enemy who doesn't think about you at all. Or alternatively, NDAs were signed to sit at the tables of 'power' and finally be able to be one of the big boys.

This is FREE FEDI so you can of course do what you want, but I think it's better to stop being so reactive to any small move that the walled gardens are doing. It's agenda setting and distracts from the goal of making fedi a good place to go to for fedi users. Clearly, fedi isn't for normies. Should it be? It seems that most people vastly prefer Zuckerberg twitter to freedom. So why compete for that crowd? Especially since the fediverse itself doesn't need to cater to anyone at all.

The software and usability situation on the fediverse has vastly improved over the last few years, and I think it will continue to do so. Let's keep working on that, being more active and less reactive, and let's try to not have meta and musk dominate the topics that are being discussed on fedi.

also #cofe