You were saying "one million every week". They hit 25 million users on 13 December. We are 4 weeks later, they still haven't reached 27 millions. Not sure why using the actual numbers is considered silly.

You are talking about the symptoms, but you are ignoring the diagnostic. The reason that Bluesky has a superior product at the moment is because they HAVE MONEY. They can go and hire people, they can invest in infrastructure, they can spend on marketing, they can go cut out deals with other service providers.

Bsky having money gives them an advantage, nobody is denying that. But Mastodon had a huge opportunity the first time Musk messed up with Twitter. They were never able to create an easy enough to use solution for people to jump over, especially when microblogging relies on "high profile" posters. If Mastodon had managed to solve the discoverability issue, and convince people that it's as easy to use as Twitter, the outcome could have been different. We'll never know.

The format of “popular social media” may change, but the fact that people will always have an interest in consuming, creating and sharing content will always be there.

Okay, let's go that route. As I said above, short video/"stories" format is king with people below 29 years old, be it Snapchat, Tiktok or BeReal https://www.statista.com/statistics/1337525/us-distribution-leading-social-media-platforms-by-age-group/

How do you plan to host video content at scale in a federated way? And if your answer is "make every teenager pay 5€ per month to get access to the network", you'll never get adoption.

At the end, that's an unfair competition. We are competing with actors who can sell data and ads to make money. Most users don't care. Those platforms make money, get more users thanks to the network effect.

I don't really see how to solve this issue.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 2 hours ago

You were saying “one million every week”. They hit 25 million users on 13 December. Not sure why using the actual numbers is considered silly.

Because it depends on what you are using as your point of reference. In the end of November, they were just 15 million users. On average, they are getting one million users per week.

How do you plan to host video content at scale in a federated way?

Hosting video is not the expensive part. It's the distribution part that worries most people, but people forget that we have the technology to distribute large static files for decades already.

And if your answer is “make every teenager pay 5€ per month to get access to the network”, you’ll never get adoption.

Please, stop using others as an excuse to your own behavior. You don't want to pay 5€ a month. You have expressed many times you think a $29/year service is "expensive", and you have said that you think that contributing to cover server costs is enough, which means that you don't see the value of a professional hosting provider. If you are a grown, functioning adult, you are more than able to choose for yourself what you value. Your behavior is not determined by what "teenagers" will or will not do.
Why is that "every teenager" is fine with paying their phone bills, their Steam subscription, Spotify, Netflix, etc, etc... but not to pay for a service that is useful to them?
It doesn't have to be between the two extremes of "free, but you get your data exploited" and "user pays everything". Alternative business models will show up. Brave's model of sharing the revenue from the (privacy-preserving) ads that users see (opt in) is one model. Bundling with services ("Sign up to Vodafone and get one a family package with 5 activitypub accounts!" "iCloud now supports ActivityPub") is another. But for these alternative models to become interesting, first we need to make ActivityPub valuable as strong contender for an application protocol.

I don’t really see how to solve this issue.

Where there's a will, there's a way.

If we go back 20 years ago, people would never believe that we would have a personal computing environment based on Free Software, and most would believe that Microsoft and Intel would dominate forever. Today we have Linux-based systems reaching almost 5% of the global market, and in some places going as high as 13%. But we didn't get there overnight, and surely we did not get there on "community" alone.