Social Control Media Isn't the Future, The Federation or Fediverse Isn't Growing, People's Accounts Vanish for Good
The Federation "peaked" a very long time ago. When? Depending on what one measures, it was years ago, maybe a decade ago.
In more recent years we saw a growing number of instances going offline (permanently, it wasn't an accident but a deliberate move). They won't be coming back, ever. A lot of data got lost. After this repeatedly happens users learn to just no longer bother. It's one among many aspects of Social Control Media which increasingly repel people; or to put it more pertinently: 1) it tries to "addict" people; 2) it distracts; 3) it spreads falsehoods; 4) it encourages abusive and/or antisocial behaviour; 5) it's very temporal and volatile.
From what we can gather, Social Control Media does not have much of a future; it transformed into "apps" (to latch onto skinnerbox notifications, for 'convenience') and many people decided to delete those "apps", which they start to see as a nuisance that does not make them happy.
If one counts all users that ever existed, then it looks like The Federation or Fediverse is very big. Misleading numbers help sell FOMO (it's not 14 million or even 4.9 million users; 638,406 were active this past month). Just ignore those big numbers as many of these accounts are inactive/dead already and lots of those instances are gone too, which means that those accounts are gone for good, not just rendered inactive/archived.
So many users vanish (including some that were devoted only to harassing me and my wife, even to impersonate us); many instances are also dead, with some domains having been hijacked by scammers. It's not a pretty picture.
One day it's "your friends", the next day it can become busty casinos.
The wisest thing to do is to accept Social Control Media is a dead end; Social Control Media sites (domains) will go offline, so users' accounts will get deleted, not just become inactive. So why bother? █
In this week's news:
