And they never will. That’s not their focus or goal. They don’t care about “gaining momentum” and explosive growth, and I wouldn’t want them to. While it’s not their goal, it should be. Social media is all about momentum, without momentum you disappear. There are hundreds of exhibits for how there can “only be one” in the social media space. The reason for that is simple; people want a means to access all their communities at one access point, it’s why facebook groups had killed 99% of the hobby forums out there by 2020, starting in 2015. This is why the fediverse would in theory actually work, but it can’t because of certain limitations in the fediverse space, and the lack of group management. Yes, friendica is sort-of like facebook, but people don’t actually want facebook. likewise, facebook groups is a terrible replacement for traditional forums, it’s like trying to hammer a nail with a screwdriver, because it’s designed for absorbing algorithm pushed junk information, not for having a healthy discussion, which basically means people just see the same questions asked every single day and there is rarely ever any discussions and when there are, the facebook search index doesn’t work well enough for people to find the information nor is the information possible to index, which is all by design, to maximize engagement at the cost of literally everything else. the problem with people is that they want both a junk information stream, and a means to enjoy rich engagement with their community. in every club i’m in, people are screaming at how they hate facebook because meta takes liberties to update their policies which directly harms the clubs activities and it just makes it impossible to manage information and the same questions are being asked every single day. the lack of active focus engagement is also causing the clubs to bleed paid membership and thus budget for national events etc. it’s really a downward spiral and it will kill a lot of hobbies before long. i’m not saying that friendica couldn’t be a good replacement, because literally ANY federated space with a means to organize club activities would do just fine (mobilizion would probably be the best), if only it had enough critical mass to let the users engage with all their communities at one single platform (spread comes after the fact), and because of the stability, ui, and condensed information stream with high activity already existing on mastodon, it is the hands down best place on the web for an exodus of all the clubs currently locked in on facebook - IF they finish their groups feature.

groups With the gup.pe concept, social groups can be formed on Mastodon today!

https://a.gup.pe/

afaik there are several of those offers and they are all now defunct. and as they are shabby work-arounds they do not offer anything in terms of technical group management, administration or data indexing, so it’s essentially worse than the already crappy state of facebook groups. not to mention, it’s i.e. not something your average 50+ year old dove fancier will use in place of facebook groups for their club activities. it’s unreasonable to try convince users to go from a bad solution to a worse solution. it would be better to just setup a traditional forum in that case; but everyone left those for facebook for a reason.

The interesting dynamic is that it seems like they’re making things that could lay lots of foundations for a lot of independent decentralised stuff, but people and devs need to actually pick that up and make it happen, and many users just want something that works.

So somewhat like lemmy-world and mastodon-social, they get stuck holding a centralised service whose success is holding hostage the decentralised system/protocol they actually care about.

For me, the thing I’ve noticed and that bothers me is that much of the focus and excitement and interest from the independent devs working in the space don’t seem too interested in the purely decentralised and fail-safe-rebuilding aspects of the system. Instead, they’re quite happy to build on top of a centralised service.

Which is fine but ignores what to me is the greatest promise of their system: to combine centralised and decentralised components into a single network. EG, AFAICT, running ActivityPub or similar within ATProto is plausible. But the independent devs don’t seem to be on that wavelength.