Jesus fucking Christ, you people are miserably pedantic. Nothing about my original post is wrong, so please kindly shut the fuck up with your “well achtually” takes.

The y axis starting zero does not change the fact that it’s exponentially growing right now. Filter that link posted below for 120 days and it is still a nearly straight vertical line of growth.

I suppose there’s two sides of the network effect. One side is how it works against a platform. In the case of the fediverse, it is working against it, for sure. The other side is how it helps a platform. For facebook, it helps. However, I would argue that these things are not immutable. Why did facebook develop a strong network effect? Because it provided a value that a lot of people saw, and encouraged them to sign up. It attracted users before it had a solidified network in place, because it built the infrastructure for the network effect to take place.

I do agree that open software is a relatively niche concept, but I think a lot of people these days can see very clearly how having one person own a whole platform and control the direction of it is a bad thing. Many of my more “normie” and less tech minded friends are talking about finding alternatives. I wish I had a place to direct them that provided the social networking functions of facebook, but it just is simply not a thing at this time. Even if there was not many people they know on there, as they join, we could find each other. We would do it as a group, as many of them are currently doing for bluesky. However, I am not recommending friendica yet because it is still not quite there.

As for the private posting functionality, I see no options to enable that, if it exists. I think there is a lot of work that needs to be done on the UI and tutorials side to enable and instruct users on how to fully utilize the site.

I mean, that’s good if you don’t want that, but I think a lot of people do. I abandoned facebook in 2017, but returned in 2022, and realized how out of touch I had become with everyone. I have friends, aunts, uncles, siblings, etc all added, and it is always nice to see what they’re up to. If you don’t want to keep in touch with people, then I guess I can see why you would not value that functionality and be fine with Friendica as is, but I think it is something a lot of people are looking for, and I would argue one of the primary values that social media provides to society.

Considering one of the biggest values that social media provides to society is being able to connect with friends and family…yes?

How can we help the network effect along though? Right now, we’re paddling upstream, because there is really no system in place for making a private circle that you can post updates to. Yea there’s private group chats, but I’m not going to set up a private group chat with this dude I went to high school with 20 years ago, just to show him my kid. We need a way to just add people we know, and show those people we know (and only those people we know) our life updates. That is, in simplest terms, the value facebook provides, which does not exist on the fediverse right now.

I’m saying the reason it is not going viral is for the exact reasons I mentioned. The reason facebook went viral in the first place. We need either a potential modification of sites like friendica to make it more linked to your social graph (i.e., import contacts to find users, require proper names so people can find you, etc), or we need a new fediverse platform to come along that does that. So I would argue we can directly control it, by implementing these features that would make these networks valuable to most people.

Why do you “have to use” whatsapp in costa rica? Other services don’t work there?

OfferUp, while not defederated, seems like a good option for a marketplace alternative for now.
Messenger can be replaced by signal, discord, or any other messaging type app.

You didn’t answer the OP’s question.