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John Gruber shares his insights regarding ActivityPub based Fediverse (which he appropriately refers as Mastodon) in this post.I enjoy Mastodon, and love Ivory, but Mastodon has seemingly peaked in popularity. It’s a niche for nerds. I think it’s a successful niche for nerds — I still see a stream of interesting content in my feed there, and enjoy thoughtful engagement from readers — but Mastodon has seemingly no mainstream relevance, and I don’t think ever will. Regular people do not want to use social networks without algorithmic feeds, and do not want to use social networks whose basic premise they do not understand.Now that we know that Threads has begun federating via ActivityPub, we will end up with a confluence of two opposite cultures. One one side there are huge number of regular people who depend on algorithmic feeds and on the other side there are a niche set of nerds who may mostly believe the following, as outlined in one of my earlier posts, without caring for mainstream relevance.Social networking in Fediverse is like a little argy-bargy (talkathon) in a village square or a downtown or a pub or a corner of a road. Here one talks publicly while being fully aware that the content is ephemeral and not archived.One would not mind being overheard in a local or even remote community. The expectation is that good content will be appreciated and carried forward by humans instead of appearing in a newspaper or getting discovered by searching though archived and persistent databases. There are no third parties monetizing the conversations. In most cases, the conversations are unlikely to have the polish and maturity for a publication.I am not considering the common users who are active on both Fediverse and Threads.

Instagram and Threads are products of a profit driven organization with advertisements as the main source of revenue. So there are recommendation algorithms to drive user engagement, through personalization of content and, hence, revenue. There is nothing wrong here. It is a business model. Since algorithms play a key role in driving user engagement and visibility of posts, conflict and polarization can dominate personalization due to dopamine effect.

So a post in Fediverse, when reflected in Threads, will become the feed of the recommendation algorithms while being exposed to the visibility of the mainstream audience. The long term outcome and impact is unknown as of now. We have wait and watch this social experiment.

#Mastodon #Fediverse #ActivityPub #Threads

cc: @srijit@mas.to