This is where going a group is not what Iโm after, as thatโs what Matrix would be good for.
A XMPP room and a Matrix group are equivalent. You can, e.g, create a room, set it to "private" and only add the people you want to see your content.
As a matter of fact, I think you could have what you want even with a basic matrix client. This is actually what I do with my family: I didn't want to share pictures of my kids on Facebook, so I created a "Family" group and we use to talk and share pictures.
It's built on XMPP. XMPP provides direct and group (room) communications. If you set up OMEMO, any message you send will be encrypted and only visible to the recipient(s).
What you are calling "timeline" is equivalent to what they are calling "blog", the concept is the same: sorted feed of events which are published to network.
ok, that's a fair point. But then this whole talk about "going vertical" and "exponential growth" is useless, and the only thing that we could (perhaps) try to take out of these mass migration events is to ask ourselves "would we able to reduce churn in the Fediverse without compromising on any principles?"
In other worlds, does this mean that the only reason that the Fediverse is small is because it is not as addictive as the other social networks? Does this mean that leaving Instagram and coming to PixelFed is the same as quitting unhealthy ultraprocessed foods and realizing that when you switch to a healthy diet you simply don't eat as much at all?
And if any of this is true, shouldnยดt we change the effort from "leave Instagram and come to PixelFed" to "Leave Instagram and quit all social media"?
If itโs indeed a trend for Lemmy to have 200% yoy growth then yeah, Iโd think thatโd be pretty successful.
You got it exactly backwards. There is a decline trend (monthly users go down month after after a spike) while the "200% growth" is not determined by any curve and can not be measured by any specific interval, because it was driven by one stochastic event that brought 100k people out of a sudden (the Reddit migration)
To go back to my original comment: let's see how the numbers are going to be in the next month. If the first derivative is still positive, then we can talk about "trends", until then we are just senseless cheering and extrapolating out of one data point.
I'm sorry, I think I was looking at overall numbers and not just Mastodon. According to https://mastodon.fediverse.observer/stats&months=48, it seems Mastodon was at ~575k MAU before Musk, shot up to ~1.5M early 2023 and is now sitting around 800k.
I don't mean that the numbers went exactly back where they were. I mean that every spike was followed by a steady decline.
Compare it with Bluesky now, or compare it with Reddit during Digg's meltdown. Their growth curves will look like an S-curve, not this series of discrete jumps followed by 40-60% loss.
At first, it was only an app for PixelFed. But AFAIK, the developer got tired of waiting Daniel to implement some needed improvements on PixelFed's API and decided to create his own backend.
I am here since before the Reddit backout and I am on Mastodon since 2018. Lemmy was at 15k MAU, went up to over 125k and now is 1/3 of that. Mastodon had 1M 575k something before Elon, hit up close to 2M 1.5M and now is sitting around 800k. (edit: I was looking at the overall charts and used wrong figures. Corrected now.)
Sure, if your reference point is waaaay before the spikes then what we have now seem "a lot". However, my point is that these spikes are far from being indicative of mass adoption.
Lemmy had the same jump in numbers during the Reddit Exodus. Mastodon had a huge boost when Elon bought Twitter.
Every spike has been a followed by a slide back to baseline in less than a couple of months. After you've seen it happen so many times, it is no longer interesting.
It's not possible with the current approach of server-centric ActivityPub software. In theory, you can have one ActivityPub account to interact with all the other services, but in practice what happens is that the different server creates a new one internally and does not give you access to the private key.
You are confusing cause and effect and you are making a pointless distinction.
If all it took to qualify as a non-profit was to eliminate profit redistribution, we would have every sole proprietorship or small LLC entity turning itself to a 503, and then distributing its excess profit as salaries.
A XMPP room and a Matrix group are equivalent. You can, e.g, create a room, set it to "private" and only add the people you want to see your content.
As a matter of fact, I think you could have what you want even with a basic matrix client. This is actually what I do with my family: I didn't want to share pictures of my kids on Facebook, so I created a "Family" group and we use to talk and share pictures.