Meanwhile mastodon is free as in freedom. If you want to, you can buy your admin a beer. People seem to like this arrangement quite a lot. You, an individual, are giving money directly to another individual for services they're providing to you with zero obligations. It feels more like buying your plumber friend a case of beer for fixing your sink and less like throwing money into a corporate void for no discernible benefit as the price slowly and invariably creeps upward.
The really cool part though is that centralized social media has to compete with the fediverse, but the fediverse does not need to compete. It's not interested in competing. It will simply continue to exist for as long as there are users. No one cares what percentage of the global population uses it, or about infinite geometric growth forever. It's just people talking to other people. It's not an experience that you get on traditional social media anymore.
AT Proto is more interesting than ActivityPub anyway, but I think BlueSky will eventually succeed because the signup is painless. You just sign up on bluesky, there's no need of discussion on which instance, etc. There's no worry about losing everything if the particular instance you're on goes down, or having to deal with migrations.
In other words, centralizing.
I haven't followed mastodon in some time but the account migration thing was a pain as well, which I feel that the AT Protocol addresses much better.
Meta just beat Q4 estimates by 10%. Just because you're seeing more traffic to your site from the fediverse doesn't mean that traditional social media is dying.
Facebook has, among other things, cut their developer support to basically zero. Bugs in the APIs sit around for years. The Groups API is just being discontinued entirely.
They're still doing well on PyTorch at least! Although they did drop GPU support for Windows soon after the WSL2 became usable (presumably because now users could just install the Linux version on Win)
Those sites are already spiritually dead in the sense that they're only tolerated and no longer enjoyed. But they've achieved too big a network effect to be replaced anytime soon.