It's easier to get involved on smaller communities about stuff that interest you than big, generic communities. I hope now that lemmy is starting to grow more and more, we'll see more of the former.

You'd still be classified as a lurker if you comment and post rarely.

just because Microsoft isn't extinguishing linux doesn't mean that they want it to grow for the average user. If anything WSL is an attempt to stop windows from leaking users to linux distros. "Look, you can use your favorite linux tools on windows too! Why use linux as an OS when you can use it as an app in windows, where we'll spy on you on every possible moment and show you ads on your start menu?"

Meta created Threads, a microblogging platform (basically a Twitter clone) that you use with your Instagram account. They've stated that in the future, Threads will be able to federate with other ActivityPub platforms.

What you describe is a big problem for generic communities such as YouShouldKnow, NoStupidQuestions etc and even hobbies where most of the people practicing them aren't good with tech.

For more niche stuff Lemmy works better because if you want to talk about, say, communism you can go to lemmygrad.ml and instantly get a front page with communities about communism. If Lemmy continues to grow I expect we'll see more themed instances pop up (e.g. about gaming, technology, fitness) and Lemmy's advantages over Reddit will be seen more clearly.

Agree with everything except the tracking; that's got to be built into it since day one, unless they didn't manage to hit their harvesting goals by the stated release date, which they want to hit in order to compete with twitter asap

Talking about any alternative scenario is always speculation, but I believe the "How to kill decentralized networks" post that's been going around lately puts it nicely:

One thing is sure: if Google had not joined, XMPP would not be worse than it is today.

The classic enshittification story.

How is it different than Twitter or Mastodon?

How convoluted the protocol is doesn't really matter as long as someone creates an easy tool to spin up your own server.

I think the XMPP comparison stills stands: Google was able to steer how the protocol developed, or which version of the protocol people used because they had the majority of the users and other servers wanted to still be able to interact with them.

Suppose that Facebook joins the fediverse and most large instances federate with them. All is great, then Facebook starts to make demands to other instances in order to keep federating with them, e.g. no posts about protests. Because a large share of ActivityPub activity will be on Threads, naive users would prefer instances that federate with it, so instance mods will be incentivized to comply with Facebook's demands to attract new users and maintain their current one and... you see where this is going. The only way to deal with this is to deny Facebook this kind of leverage in the first place, either by blocking them instantly or at their first mishap or demand.

That's the problem though. If XMPP had grew organically then it would fare much better. With how it happened, XMPP's growth was mostly because of Google, and that put a lot of pressure to other servers and the protocol's development to cater to them, because they had the majority of the users in their platform.

Correct me if I'm wrong but this is baked into capitalism. Stocks are attractive to investors because they want to sell them for a higher price later on, and stock prices increase when the company grows.