Even after Automattic acquired it, the site continued to lose money at a rate of $30 million each year, the company’s CEO Matt Mullenweg had said.
I still wanna know what they’re spending all that money on, because I’m sure it’s not developers or even servers. The idea that they can only be profitable if they’re constantly growing their user numbers is an investor idea that’s doomed to fail eventually and why so many social media sites are crashing right now
I see no mention of ActivityPub in the article, but I’m wondering if this is part of their plan to eventually integrate Tumblr into the fediverse as well.
However I agree with others that this will likely result in hella janky hackable websites first…hopefully it smoothes out.
if they’re constantly growing their user numbers
All social media needs to constantly grow because attrition. Social media requires basic levels of user ship to be functional, even lemmy. Its a network effect where you need to have certain levels of users for some emergent properties to exist. For example, I speculate that defederation early between .ml and .world was the trigger that will eventually kill lemmy, principally because this results in fragmentation and a reduction in the properties we would get from “more users”. Having more users begets more users, more content, more memes, etc. And I don’t necesssarily see the defederation as something unneccessary, but what I’m describing is an inherent property of networks. Its not something that can really be argued with because this behavior is consistent across physical, biological, social networks. It just “is” as a property.
So foundationally, you can’t sit still on a train moving backwords (which it always is). An organism needs to be constantly recruiting and growing new cells into its network because its also always dying. Growth is “holding still” for any networked system.
Lemmy can work without user accounts made directly on the server. I’m posting from a completely different instance using completely different software (mbin), and I can see both .ml and .world and interact with them both just fine despite their defederation from each other.
It’s kind of more like a random street gathering instead of an exclusive club.
Or like the golden age of instant messengers, where you had multiple choices of multi-client apps like Trillian.
You still had individual accounts for each IM platform, but a single app to chat on any platform.
