chat

In general, people will stick to communities and platforms they find, like, for example, many games I play don't have a presence in lemmy because the fediverse's concept itself is already very alternative because most people just join wherever their friends / co-workers are, which is the mainstream platforms.

The rising costs of hosting your own server is also a factor, and generally, hexbear itself is more focused on politics, which is fine, but more niche topics or interests are lost, and only through dedicated posting can that be changed, but most hexbearians here obviously have IRL stuff to do, and not all of them share the same interests, such as the c/slop community. Some people like it (like me) while others don't, and that's also fine.

But it's that the tendency of 'power users' that have more free time and thus able to be more chronically online are also more reactionary due to how they got the money and time to do so, this is seen in reddit. The fediverse is like, maintaining an open source project. You can have donations, or even encouraged to work for various reasons such as ideology or use-value, but volunteer labour is very precarious especially in a time of crisis such as today, so it's not entirely surprising users go offline.

I think the Fediverse is a good concept, but, like the open source software is built on, it will only grow if it provides a genuine better experience than mainstream, which is why leftists and free software people go here since our priorities differ from those who stay at the mainstream platforms. The concept of an internet built on fediverse principles with state support is not fully realized yet, but I do think it's possible, if the server hardware for it is still available, that is.

"It's those damn tankies making people not want to join!"

kind of a failed project in my eyes, the idea was neat but that's about it as centralization is a force that naturally takes over