There's never really going to be such a thing as a thriving small social network.
The idea of a social network where almost all of your friend and family are on, is really something that started in the 2020'.
In many way, Mastodon is just the phpBB of the 2020', with the added benefit that you could connect to other phpBB instances.
And even though hosting your own phpBB instance or IRC/TeamSpeak/Mumble server kinda fell out of favor due to Reddit and Discord, they also kind of act in the same way. Sure you have one login to access all the community instead of having to have a separate account for each, but each community are their own bubble and can moderate however they like. It is not a "worlwide forum" like twitter or instagram.
With all of their downsides, it's only huge social networks that actually brought the vast majority of people to the internet at all.
It was thriving for me, and I was barely a teenager at the time.
I was never a heavy IRC user, but yeah back in the 00s, especially the earlier two-thirds, I had several different forums on my browser hotbar that I’d make the rounds through a couple of times each day.
Kind of miss that honestly, each forum was its own unique beast with an entirely different set of personalities without also being polarized. Contrast that to modern social networks which have a samey grey-paste quality unless one seeks out highly polarized services, which are often too caustic to spend time in without risking becoming similarly caustic yourself.
I would disagree with the timing here. I think the peak "everyone on one network" was Facebook in the early 2010's and since then the market has splintered to other social networks, sometimes along generational lines, others based on use case.
That's why social networks seem so magical early on, not only is everyone you like maybe on them, but there will be new people in the next week, month, or year that you'll like too. New things and new ideas are possible. But at some point, this turns sour. Eternal September describes that phenomenon, I think, but doesn't explain it well.
In some unfortunate networks, I think the latter can come even before the former (preempting it, making it impossible). You don't ever get the golden age.
Mastadon looks alot like this. Ignoring the politics, it looks alot like Voat did, and all the "we didn't learn the lessons of Voat" reddit alternatives that came after. It's almost as if you can't build a social network as a refugee tent city and make anything that anyone wants. Maybe that's the problem. In such a place where everyone is fleeing, there is nothing new there. It's all the same old people who were at the last place with you, there is nothing new about it.
Just because you're not on them doesn't mean they don't exist.
I wouldn't namedrop the ones I like here because I like them the way they are, but consider: there are so many 100-200 member Discords with consistent and vibrant communities.
They're not trying to become hypermassive cash engines, but that's okay and even good. That's a grim way to exist.
Slack has a free tier too.
90-days of history only, is as much a feature as it is a bug. Idle "off-the record" talk with current and/or ex colleagues in a bar after work isn't recorded indefinitely, why should the online equivalent?
I'll take suggestions for a better (easy, cheap or free, functional, familiar) small community platform?
Fun to see this posted on a pretty niche but very active site which covers probably a small proportion of your social circle.
(I shudder in horror to think what email would look like if it was invented today by some Silicon Valley techbro startup - interoperability somehow isn't even considered as an option anymore)
I also don't like the convergence of online identifies with real identifies in communities which also tends to ruin the point of an online community for me.
So having different groups for different purposes is precisely what I do want and having every human on Earth on one platform is the exact opposite of what I would want.
And there's absolutely no reason for any of these networks to cross paths. The idea that everyone needs to be in one network, is just as logical as my mother reading my HN comments.
And Mastodon in particular will let you follow people on whatever instance you happen to use. "Checking 20 different apps to talk to 20 slightly different groups of people" is hyperbole, not reality.
Yes. And while the GP was hyberbolic, I think what we saw is that a large %age of people preferred one stop shopping.
Speaking for myself, the thing I love(d) the most about Twitter was the consolidation. It effectively replaced a bunch of message boards, online sites, and other things I would check throughout the day. One site gave me banter with friends, talking shop with professional acquaintances, weather, news, gossip, etc.
Facebook has long provided a user-friendly interface for non-geek users. It's filled with non-geeks generating content.
While the Internet has always had a geek contingent it hasn't been the exclusive domain of geeks for nearly thirty years.
Says the post on a thriving discussion forum that isn't even a social network. Quality has a quality all of its own.
The nice thing about a federated system is that it's ONE app to talk to 20 slightly different groups of people.
literally posting this to the HN audience...
It's quite normal.
You are saying this on Hackernews, out of all places... which is an example of one.
Twitter, that we all love to talk about, has only a very small penetration with around 200 millions of active users.
And there are still myriads of tiny web forums with very active communities. I don't think every social network needs to have a global penetration.
Then why do we have Linkedin, Twitter, Reddit, Youtube, Orkut, Whatsapp, Instagram, SnapChat, QQ, Facebook, Hackernews, Discord, and Stackoverflow?
What you say people don't want, is exactly what people already do.
If anything, activitypub fixes this. The whole idea of the protocol is interoperability: that you need only one app to check all of them. Whether they are 5 twitter clones talking AP, or a Linkedin, youtube, meetup, and twitter-alike talking AP: all are interoperable, and you can interact with all of them from just one account and app.