Meta announced today that Threads now has reached 400 million monthly active users. Starting at about the same time with a similar product, Bluesky currently is at about 6 million MAUs. Mastodon and other Fediverse projects started earlier, and their numbers are even lower ... by some margin! None of them are growing much, while Threads is.
This tells me
The choice between a traditional social media platform or the open social web seems to boil down to "do I want to control people to only do things my way" or "do I want to thrive by enabling people to make their own choices".
Done with the slides for my talk "From Millions to Billions -- a plausible narrative for growing the Open Social Web", to be (first?) given at #FediCon this Friday in Vancouver, BC, Canada.
I expect this to be permanent work in progress, as this community / network / market / whatever it all is evolves, and I'm sure that some people will tell me it is not plausible or could be more plausible. Which would be the best outcome ... I love learning from my "audience" because it gets better that way.
Quite interesting conversation between @rabble and Jack Dorsey on the history of Twitter, why Jack left Bluesky, and what he thinks is needed in terms of a social media protocol and why.
Agree or disagree, this first recorded episode in Rabble's new podcast revolution.social is worth listening to.
Tim O’Reilly: “AI has adopted colonialism as its business model”.
Strong words! But he explains: “Extract resources from others and use it to enrich yourself and your customers at the expense of those whose resources you have taken, without giving much back.”
Guilty as charged I would say.
