cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1121773
I am confused. Why hasn’t mastodon capitalized on this yet? With the drama of reddit and hype around lemmy shouldn’t we see some fanfare for mastodon and other open source alternatives too? Meanwhile a meta-affiliated product logs 5 million users on launch day.
Facebook has like 3 billion monthly active users. 5 million is like .001%. Throw up a mastodon sign up to every Facebook user and you’d probably see similar results.
You have a point. But the question becomes, why isn’t the fediverse doing the same? To the best of my knowledge, lemmy and mastodon relies on user initiatives with no organized effort to grab as many users as possible (not to discredit the extreme overtime that admins of lemmy.world are doing).
Other instances are doing the opposite, closing registrations left and right or making it harder by requiring multiple essays and job-like interviews as barriers for entry.
Sorry if I sound a little bit frustrated but i sincerely believe that this is a perfect opportunity to cast fediverse and open source into the mainstream and genuinely compete with corporate and commercialized platforms.
Because the way Threads works is almost seamlessly allowing existing Instagram users to create a Threads account. There is no corollary for Masto or Lemmy or any Fed entities to do something similar.
It’s corporate synergy, baby.
I use Instagram primarily to follow quilters, who are primarily older and mostly women. A lot of them are relentless self promotion machines, as you would expect of small business owners who advertise through Instagram, so of course they are creating the new account Instagram has alerted them about. I’d imagine a huge proportion of new Threads users are the same, and their followers get notices about them using the new service. There is no way for Lemmy to do that.
I think it’s about advertising. it’s very corny, but it’s true. if mastodon/lemmy had the same advertising power as Facebook/Twitter, then there would be comparable results.
5 million mostly fake users? We could have 10 million in a heartbeat.
