So, confession time: I was recently helping a new client get set up on the Fediverse—guiding them through their first steps into our glorious decentralized galaxy. And seeing it all again through fresh eyes?
Reader, it was brutal.
So much of what should be table stakes for any social media UX in the year of our Lord 2025 still is missing or deeply broken still. I know progress has been made and a good fight, fought.
IMHO for the same reason why Myspace has over hundreds of millions of MAU and Spacehey has got only over million of users overall.
IMHO solving UX sins does not bring new users. It rather helps not to deter them.
The Great Migration from Reddit did not repeat with the same scale, as with Great Twitter Migrations. Even then, most people IMHO return rather to their already existing accounts on already existing instances. Fedia.io has over 5 thousands total users, less than dozen Lemmy servers.
With the lemm.ee going down, we will witness a MAU drop. A non-zero number of people care no more about federation and will not make a switch.
There might not be enough stock of users to repeat /kbin’s growth right now. Even recent developments at PieFed make its MAU number only slightly larger than Mbin
The best way to do a migration is to do it with joy and awe. Mbin has no kbin.social’s big numbers, no ernest’s individual vision, no marketing, no promise of awesome development, and a rump of spontaneously forming culture of the flagship instance.
Many of these “redemptions” still depend on scale - both of the local instance… and the external Fediverse. /kbin and Mbin benefit from Mastodon, but its MAU is shrinking too…
People don’t generally flock for a software. Maybe for wobbly windows, but we are not doing e.g. Misskey-Flavoured Markdown here (yet?)