This is all totally fair. You are right that I am perhaps looking a bit critically at the numbers, more than I should. It's not rapid growth, but it is growth none the less. I guess my overall point is just one of frustration of knowing that it could be growing faster if certain things were in place. All good points though, and I particularly appreciate the point on outside of the box thinking for how things are implemented, that is definitely needed.

I mean relative to the all time search history. It's completely exponential compared to previous time periods, but sadly we are also on the downswing of the trend. So we may have already missed the opportunity to catch these users, but it is worth noting.

Fair! I will say that some platforms are better than others in this regard. For example, I was able to see this post on mastodon and reply to comments, but those comments do not show up on piefed. Not sure where they do show up, but I have had conversations from mastodon to users on Lemmy. So yea, it's pretty disjointed and disorganized, and not living up to the full potential of what activitypub was designed to do.

I am definitely looking for platforms that exist and seeing what can be built off of, but from what I can tell, it needs more work than is within the scope of existing platforms. The two primary problems I am working on are 1. Unifying the fediverse functionalities in one place and one clean UI, i.e. microblogs, forum, events, marketplace, etc, and 2. Importing your social graph from any platform, Facebook, Instagram, threads, x, mastodon, bluesky, Lemmy, etc, and recombining it into a single feed as much as possible using activitypub, at protocol, oauth, webscraping, and rss feeds. I am happy to team up with anyone interested, and I will definitely take a look at what you are working on.

Your last sentence highlights my primary point. How do we make the fediverse a good experience? That is the crux of my issue, and what I think is lacking. For 99+% of users, it is not a good experience currently, and I would like to understand how we can change that. I acknowledge the power of the network effect, but I do not think it is insurmountable or unable to be used to the advantage of the fediverse if we think creatively.

User numbers are a basic health metric of any platform. Sociology and economics are very related to the practical functionality of a platform. If users find it too tedious or confusing to use, they won't use it. If they don't get good or consistent performance due to poorly optimized infrastructure, them they will not stick around.

I am not saying to use others as models. I am saying that there are basic functionalities that don't exist in a fully formed way on the fediverse, like private messages or events. This is not some novel concept that Facebook invented but they have done it in a clean and polished way that users appreciate. When they try alternatives on the fediverse, the difference is jarring. That is the discussion I am hoping to have here, not about some theoretical end state of social media platforms operating within a capitalist system that may or may not be based in data or fact.

It's true that the network effect is a huge blocker to the larger success of the fediverse. Facebook solved this early on by making your profile "you", so users could just search for a name of someone you know, and they pop up. The fediverse doesn't work like that, currently.

I take quite a bit of issue with the last paragraph. It's like saying "what do you think this is, some kind of social media platform", when someone is looking for a place to post updates for relatives. You tell them to just text them. Sure, they could do that but it is by no means as seamless and easy to browse your history of content as something like Facebook or Instagram. You don't get birthday reminders or mundane life updates through group text. How about bands or artists that want a profile to share their music or art? Should they text their followers too? Overall, I think it is a bit of a ridiculous statement and distracts from the topic at hand, which is how do we make the fediverse better and able to reach it's full potential? Sure there are alternatives to social media out there. That's not what we are talking about here.