this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Fediverse
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A lot of community types just simply don't work without a minimum critical mass of members.
Imagine asking a programming question on a software development community of just 5 people. You end up with 3 people who aren't active enough to see the question, 1 person sees but doesn't have an answer and doesn't respond (classic lurker), and one person sees it and responds that they don't know the answer. Now imagine a community of 5 thousand people...it's suddenly much more feasible to even bother asking the question.
Sure, fediverse could exist with just 5 people, but it would be worthless and pointless.
One could make the argument that 5000 users is still not mass adoption. If that is enough activity, then mass adoption is not a requirement for the fediverse to be a nice social place to be.
5,000 users in a niche community would need hundreds of millions in the wider network.
This is how bulletin boards used to work. The most successful were focused on a niche and one with 5,000 users would be big enough to be of use to people interested in that niche. But when your niche is part of a much larger community covering all niches, that community needs to be vast to get 5,000 subscribing to any given niche.