Good article from David Pierce. I'd add that many of these platforms (i.e. Mastodon, Lemmy, PeerTube, WordPress) have strong RSS support which offer another degree of freedom from opting out of signing up for any of the platforms but still being able to follow the people and topics you care about. Sure, the experience may not be as rich but it's yet another way for people to participate in the ecosystem.

A new kind of social internet is currently forming. Right now it might still look like “Twitter and Reddit, only different,” but that’s only the very beginning of what’s to come. Hopefully.

I’m convinced we’ll be better off with a hundred different apps for Snapchat or Instagram or X instead of just one...

It doesn’t make sense that we have a dozen usernames, a dozen profiles, a dozen sets of fans and friends. All that stuff should belong to me, and I should be able to access it and interact with it anywhere and everywhere.

Decentralizing social media can sound like a sort of kumbaya anti-capitalist manifesto: “It’s about openness and sharing, not capitalism, man!” In practice it’s the opposite: it’s a truly free market approach to social networking.

...in a fediverse-dominated world, the way to win is not to achieve excellent lock-in and network effects. The only way to win is to build the best product.

...so far we’re mostly in the “popular app, but federated” phase of this transition.

Almost everything in the fediverse is a one-to-one competitor to an existing platform...Some of these apps are very good! But nearly all of them are differentiated only in that they’re federated.

Let’s be super clear about this: the point of the fediverse is not that it’s federated...Making the “It’s federated!” argument is like making the “It’s better for privacy!” argument: it makes you feel good, and at best it’s a useful tiebreaker, but it doesn’t actually matter. All that matters is the product.

2023 was the year “fediverse” became a buzzword, 2024 will be the year it becomes an industry. (Hopefully one with a better name, but I’ll get over that.) We’ve spent too long living our lives online in someone else’s spaces. What’s next will belong to all of us. All that’s left to do is start posting.