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Comment by hannasanarion | Hacker News Reader

> Neither Hacker News nor federation (I expect) are going to take over the world, but they have their respective audiences.

You see how this is at odds with the claim that federation is "in vogue", right?

Federation is a small and shrinking niche. It had a brief moment in 2017, and has been in recession ever since.

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Is it really shrinking? Mastodon gained 950k users in 2021, combining with other platforms they probably gained over a million.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2021/12/mastodon-recap-2021/

Projects like Matrix.org are also seeing huge growth. Of course these are nothing on FAANG scale, but still far from shrinking.

Of those 950,000 sign-ups, only 814 users remained active according to the very same page you linked.

That's not a cultural wave, that's a fad more swingy than gym memberships in January. "Vogue" technologies don't have a 99.93% churn rate.

That's sort of a misreading of the figures though, isn't it? It's not that those 950K sign-ups have all disappeared; you just have a slightly higher replacement level of new entrants. What it describes have a fairly consistent monthly usage rate -- not leaping up, but not dropping either. That also seems to be what the more in-depth statistics here indicate: https://the-federation.info/mastodon

I'm not saying that you're any more wrong than the idea that federation is currently "in vogue", but it doesn't seem right to suggest that this is something that is in decline, either.

Maybe you could argue that in the face of increasing numbers of adoption of social media more generally? Are we steady-stating there too, though?

What is the evidence of this recession?

What is the evidence that it's "in vogue"?

The only major events in the fediverse from the last several years to have any cultural impact is the rise of federated porn after the Tumblr exodus, and the rise in federated white nationalist forums after Trump got banned from Twitter. The fact that federation is becoming popular among pornographers and fascists is certainly not backing up the assertion that federation is "in vogue".

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