Last couple of months has been dramatic and there is a huge demand for ethical and safe social media. Even mainstream conservatives start to look for alternatives when US oligarchs wage hybrid warfare against their nation.
And there are so many low hanging fruits right now. Like Facebook event and marketplace replacements on the fediverse. Or just a Facebook alternative that isn’t Frendica. Or maybe a commercial fork of Frendica.
I’m not involved in any development of fediverse software, so I’m asking here. Do you experience more interest from venture capital?
Also, I assume EU will pour big money into social media alternatives, starting 2025.
Note: I’m not interested in a discussion regarding if VC is good or bad for the fediverse. That’s a good topic for another post though.
Daniel the developer has received 4 venture capitalist offers for Pixelfed.
How would you make money if you can’t control the platform? Investing in the fediverse is a terrible investment case.
I’m not a developer either, so take this as an observer’s speculation.
My impression is that venture capitalists took a long look at the fediverse and chucked their money at Bluesky instead, because it actually works more similar to “ye olde” social networks — specifically with a business plan, road map and traditional organisational structure.
The parts of the fediverse that I am most inclined toward is too unruly, recalcitrant and noncommercial to attract deeper interest from VC investors. They are deliberately built and organised to resist expectancy of capital return on investments.
So my conclusion is the reverse of what you’d rather not discuss — in my eyes, the fediverse isn’t very good for investors, because until now it’s largely been grassrootsy. It will be interesting to see what VC-friendly platforms emerges in the vein of Bluesky or even Threads, and to what degree they will overlap with the current fediverse.
They already know, it’s just fediverse developers are radically anit-VC so reject any offers out of principle.
Facebook’s Threads already exists, so I guess they discovered it last year
Like Facebook event and marketplace replacements on the fediverse. Or just a Facebook alternative that isn’t Frendica. Or maybe a commercial fork of Frendica.
What? Why? How? What?
There’s no reason monetisation can’t be built into the Fediverse as it is. Ghost is looking like a good replacement for Substack for those that want to monetise their blog/newsletter. Flohmarkt is a Fediverse classified ads service. I don’t think it’ll be long before we see an Fediverse Patreon or eBay, for example, I just suspect the early Fediverse adopters have been so anti-capitalist that they have either rejected such things or overlooked them entirely. However, it’ll be key for getting content creators to move over to the Fediverse as they’ll want to keep their income stream.
In the meantime, more attention on the Fediverse should mean grant money flows in and crowd funding takes off.
