and you will leave the fediverse? (failed to find your new profile.)

My own estimate was (and remains) that I don't think D will last much longer, so it was not worth all the effort of pod-hopping just to have any new pod close as well. You can find me now at:

https://bsky.app/profile/gander22h.bsky.social

OMG! Does this mean all diaspora instances will shut down?

No, this is just one (more) pod shutting down, so on Tuesday there should still be 53 pods left, although several more have indicated they will close soon as well.

You can note that diasp.org had its stats reporting turned off at Christmas, so you probably won't see a big drop in users on Wednesday as they weren't being reported anyway. The small bump in users that shows up in the February stats was probably the diasp.org users who chose to move, showing up on new pods.

Otherwise D* will carry on, although, as per the graphs, probably with fewer pods and users left.

Well the rest of the fediverse is still there, although even Mastodon is shrinking in terms of monthly active users and the number of servers are dropping fast:

https://mastodon.fediverse.observer/dailystats

I agree the number of Mastodon monthly active users is fairly flat over time at about 874,000, but the servers are falling off steadily.

I suspect the reasons are the same as on D*. Setting up a server and running it takes expertise, time and money and since it is just random people doing it they get bored, run out of money, get a job, have to move homes, get married, have kids and so on. There is time and effort involved, plus liability. After years it gets to be less worthwhile and many just give up.

I think that distributed networks run by individuals have not proven successful.

The business model comes later. It's commercial, so it's going to have a model similar to all other commercial-but-free services.

You'll be the product, you'll get screwed over one way or the other. Simple as that, there's no such thing as a free breakfast.

Bluesky at least has plans to reach break-even using premium membership features and peer-to-peer financial transactions, but no advertising. They have over 33M users and growing fast, cannibalizing users from X and FB. We'll see how that works out in the longer term. I'll feel happier when they break even.

They at least have competent management:

Incidentally here is Friendica's numbers:

https://friendica.fediverse.observer/dailystats

They have about 3,500 active monthly users right now and falling slowly.

@Hans van Zijst I am not so sure. They are a "public benefit corporation" and they have committed to doing it right without advertising.

I would encourage all the Bluesky naysayers to watch the recent interview with their CEO first. She is smart, idealistic, principled and knows where all the other social media networks have failed, including D* (by name in the interview):

I wouldn't be so sure about those ads. In January 2024 Graber promised not to enshittify BS with ads, but in December she said something different.

When asked if Bluesky would always be free of advertisers like it is today, Graber said: “I don’t think that’s necessarily true.”

But, as I said, that comes later. You first make sure though people are on board, so that they can't leave easily, and then you start adding shit.

It will likely be a long time until Bluesky starts actively monetizing since the company is primarily focused on growth these days.

I'll stick to stuff I control, no Bluesky for me.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/05/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-is-reshaping-social-media-but-advertising-isnt-off-the-table/

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber isn't ruling out advertising | TechCrunch

Bluesky has blown up this year thanks to a vibrant community of posters, user customization choices, and a decentralized protocol that doesn't lock users

^{Maxwell Zeff (TechCrunch)}

Okay, I won't see you there, then.

I have been on Bluesky since November, before diasp.org announced it was closing.

I will add that there is no control on D* these days either. Your choices are to pod-hop when your pod closes or not. I just didn't see the point in being the last user here.

@Adam Hunt Interesting video. I'm half-way and will see the rest of it later today.

But as far as I know, even if you host your own PDS, you're still forced to connect to BlueSky's servers to communicate. That's centralization and something I don't want.

Anyway, I'll finish the video later 👍

Umm Bluesky is not part of the fediverse, but it is already a disbursed network under the AT Protocol.

You can note that I have already connected with most of my friends from D* over there already.

@Andrew Pam - I appreciate the offer, but due to the lack of effective migration tools, I honestly don't think it is worth all the effort to set up a whole new profile and chase down my contacts all over again.

As I noted in my original post, D* is shedding users and pods fast right now. That may level off again at some point soon, but that will leave only a few users and pods left and that will result in a continuing loss of interest as feeds will empty out. Below a certain point losing users leads to losing more users.

Bigger and growing networks have much more to offer than watching things dwindle here. I have not only already reconnected with many people from D* over on Bluesky, but also found what we never managed to get here. Most of my city council is on Bluesky, including my mayor. My MPP is there along with my Prime Minister and most of the federal opposition leaders, too, and they all post regularly, especially now as we have a federal election on. Many reporters, columnists and political pundits are there offering comment on the day's events, as are many authors. I am getting good engagement on my own posts and from a large group of people who live in my city and do the same activities I do, like skiing and biking. We are already collaborating on projects. I saw a lot of scammers there back in November, but those have dropped to near zero now, as they realized that it is not a network of newbies, but mostly experienced social media users from other networks and, plus the blocking tools are extremely effective. The effective blocking tools have also made the right wing trolls largely give up there, as they get very lonely very fast.

There are many nice features there we don't have here, like posting videos and posting images into comments on posts. Even the 300 character limit is a net-positive as I don't see the huge TLDR screeds there. It breeds conciseness.

Over the 14 years I was here on D* I was able to entice some IRL friends to create accounts here, but every last one of them left when they found the blocking tools didn't work well and they were harassed by romance scammers and left wing lunatics, or just found that no one was posting about local issues or things that they were interested in.

I'm going to post some Caturday cats and then leave it at that. It has been a great 14 years on D* for me. I am grateful for all the friends I made here. Most are already over at Bluesky and we'll carry on there. For people only staying on here, hopefully I'll see you around somewhere on the web.

I'm at:

https://bsky.app/profile/gander22h.bsky.social

Bigger and growing networks have much more to offer than watching things dwindle here.

I appreciate Adam's insightful and broad perspective, but comparing bluesky and diaspora is comparing apples and oranges, like comparing a large city to a small town. Plus bluesky is a 300 word limit microblogging site, essentially like a bulletin board at a large market place. Great for sharing news across a broad reach of people, but definitely not for social intimacy and social interaction.

I hope diaspora keeps on keeping on.

An obvious illustration of the difference is that you rarely, if ever, have this sort of conversation on bluesky.

Interestingly you can have good social interaction on facebook, but yikes, only at the cost of your soul because of the commercial abuse.

Lol, i meant to say 300 character limit per post, not 300 words.

But, it is interesting to note that the bluesky user interface makes it easy to chain a series of small posts into a thread which compensates somewhat. Even still, chaining microblogging posts is an awkward hack at best.

Plus, bluesky doesn't send out notifications when people add to the conversation, so consequently discussions quickly fade out.

It part of an overall "context collapse" that microblog posts suffer in general.

As I said it promotes conciseness, which is not always a bad thing.

It certainly beats some of the issues on D*. We had one account here, now thankfully dormant, that posted 134 rants in one day, averaging 5,000 words long each... I didn't know humans could type that fast.

promotes conciseness s/b requires conciseness.

However, i will note that after talking to some academics on mastodon, I learned a lot about how to be concise, and how to deal with context collapse.

To all users on pods which are closing, don't forget to download your posts and photos archives, I'm planing to enable an early version of the migration import on https://diaspora-fr.org so that you can move with your contacts and posts if you wish to.

Msg from Fla (podadmin of diaspora-fr.org )

The real issue is not whether there are thousands, or millions of users, because, yes, you can't talk to everyone anyway. The question is is one of survival. D* has 4,300 active users now and that is decreasing over time. Pods are closing. D* will still be around for a long time yet, until the last pod owner dies, runs out of money or loses interest. But sooner than that you will come on and find that the last post anyone made was your own post from a week ago.

Did you know https://myspace.com/ still exists? Just no one uses it.