Today I discovered the Fediverse Software Database, and it’s a bit disheartening to see how many platforms have so few users. What are some ways we could help promote these smaller or newer Fediverse projects and give them more visibility?
Today I discovered the Fediverse Software Database, and it’s a bit disheartening to see how many platforms have so few users. What are some ways we could help promote these smaller or newer Fediverse projects and give them more visibility?
One cannot go past hundreds, maybe few thousands MAU without a significant hype and mainstream attention.
Mastodon was the decentralised social network and main ex-Twitter alternative at the time. Misskey attracted Japanese artists from a specific theme , exiled by Twitter. Pixelfed benefitted with Instagram’s moderation drama and then with a Streisand effect. Its autor helped it with some marketing but this only helped with the migration wave, not caused it. Lemmy and /kbin grew on Reddit API debacle. PeerTube is one of self-hosting video solutions and a P2P video platform and a federated one. NodeBB and WordPress carried over their legacy user bases.
No other platform has more than several thousands MAU
Speaking of Kbin, how is it rn? My first account was made on there after all
Kbin the software has died - technically there is still one small instance in Poland that uses it, but all others have ceased, and the software is no longer being maintained under that name - yet the project lives on in its fork Mbin.
Instances that include the kbin word - e.g. kbin.earth - only retain that now as a legacy.
Sadly I don’t think anyone has heard from Ernst, the original developer and admin of kbin.social.
App support finally came to Mbin though, see “Interstellar”.
A spiritual successor to Kbin’s design philosophy that is very much worth checking out is “PieFed”, which I am writing to you now using it :-). Most apps that work with Lemmy also now work with it (except Thunder support still coming “soon™” but available only in the beta version for now, not the Play Store one). PieFed is written in Python rather than the obscure Rust language so its pace of development has been extremely rapid in comparison to Lemmy and it now has a feature set well beyond that of either Lemmy or Mbin. If you want to access both the Threadiverse/Lemmy/Mbin communities/magazines as well as Fediverse/Mastodon-style content, Mbin is still your best bet as it was designed for exactly that, but for Threadiverse stuff it offers numerous advantages. Anyway it is so nice to have choices to pick from!:-)
Piefed seems interesting! Might register an account there :) Hurrah for the wonders of open source! I’m a bit worried about Ernest though. Didn’t he have a bunch of health issues?