Mastodon has been around since 2016 and has 804k MAU.

The platform has 57 third party apps.

The platform is decentralized and has community ran servers.

  • Kecessa@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    71·
    14 hours ago

    All those federated platform will only become popular if the backend is dumb and the frontend is smart, i.e. you create your account on a frontend but can use the same credentials to connect via another frontend and no matter which frontend you connect to, all content for the platform is accessible to you, there’s no admin having control over your experience, only people offering different UI experiences. Federation/defederation/deciding to host NSFW content, that’s all taken care of behind the scene just like on Reddit, for the user they’re just using Lemmy via frontend X or Y and they decide what communities and users they want to block.

      • _pi@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        13 hours ago

        This practically means nothing tbh. Social networks when they gain economies of scale due to the network effect will effectively shed all the pretense of open source and open platform etc.

        We’ve seen it with Facebook, Google, etc, during the 2010’s with closing of chat standards and destruction of XMPP. Reddit 3rd Party API access is another example of this. We’ll see it again.