Probably something going wrong with their back-end.

The pressure on instances has been pretty high since the reddit migration, a lot of things could’ve broken along the way. I know I had to totally dump my database and rebuild my instance a little while in because something went catastrophically wrong during a software upgrade. (Backups? Where we’re going we very much need backups but we won’t have them because the instance was like a week old lol)

They didn’t start with that?

Imagine the epic failure!

Could be you’re just a cut above and you didn’t even realize it! :)

I agree with you on that. It’s like you get the benefits of the Internet, but also the benefits of a single point of use.

Let’s look at a lot of game companies – they have their own forums, but they also have to have facebook et al because they want to have something they totally control but they also want something accessible easily. Imagine if they federated their forums, and suddenly all these little forums have a lot more reach and the people in charge of the projects can control them more than big tech would let them. Win/win/win. And we cut out a middle-man in the process.

Real talk, stuff like the fediverse has always always existed. Usenet, IRC, forums. Even email is a giant federated service.

The thing is, the billionaires have the resources to make something really nice and make you not want to spend time there, so the population stays relatively small.

Realistically, even among tech savvy people we see a lot of people complaining that the fediverse is too complex, and it isn’t a place that can be gamed like big tech so a lot of big names will likely stay over there.

that’s all a good thing. Stay big enough to be fun, small enough to stay off the radar.