What would it cost to run the #fediverse at scale? With billions instead of millions of users?
What does it cost to run a social network anyway? According to the annual reports of two companies that should know, the comparable seems to be about $1-$2 per user per month. And that's after stripping out a bunch of costs, like us not building ad tech in the fediverse.
Have better numbers? I'd love to see them!
From a recent talk of mine:
βMastodonβs developers β many of whom were queer and trans β did not enjoy the privilege of living the totally open life: they needed privacy and safety, means to protect themselves from harassment.β
Which led to particular choices that were made for #ActivityPub. Good ones imho.
1/2
"these problems may be rooted in the very architecture of social media platforms: networks that grow through emotionally reactive sharing. If so, improving online discourse will require more than technical tweaks β it will demand rethinking the fundamental dynamics of interaction and visibility that define these environments."
Fellow social media innovators: Should we accept the challenge from this paper? https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03385
How big is the open social web, the #fediverse, #bluesky etc compared to the big commercial platforms? It's a bit sobering.
From my recent talk "From millions to billions -- a plausible narrative for how to grow the open social web."
Meta announced today that Threads now has reached 400 million monthly active users. Starting at about the same time with a similar product, Bluesky currently is at about 6 million MAUs. Mastodon and other Fediverse projects started earlier, and their numbers are even lower ... by some margin! NoneΒ of them are growing much, while Threads is.
This tells me
The choice between a traditional social media platform or the open social web seems to boil down to "do I want to control people to only do things my way" or "do I want to thrive by enabling people to make their own choices".
