Last couple of months has been dramatic and there is a huge demand for ethical and safe social media. Even mainstream conservatives start to look for alternatives when US oligarchs wage hybrid warfare against their nation.
And there are so many low hanging fruits right now. Like Facebook event and marketplace replacements on the fediverse. Or just a Facebook alternative that isn’t Frendica. Or maybe a commercial fork of Frendica.
I’m not involved in any development of fediverse software, so I’m asking here. Do you experience more interest from venture capital?
Also, I assume EU will pour big money into social media alternatives, starting 2025.
Note: I’m not interested in a discussion regarding if VC is good or bad for the fediverse. That’s a good topic for another post though.
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How would you make money if you can’t control the platform? Investing in the fediverse is a terrible investment case.
You can control the platform, so long as “the platform” means only your own instance. I have tabs open right now to both reddit.com and discuss.tchncs.de and the only difference as far as “control” is concerned is that here I can read posts by users, and from communities, that are registered elsewhere than discuss.tchncs.de too, the operators of the latter still otherwise have the same “control” as those as of reddit.
Hm, they have control over the instance but not directly (except if they fork etc) over the software? So comparing to reddit they can’t modify the UI to include ads, can’t inject tracking, etc.
I’m not a developer either, so take this as an observer’s speculation.
My impression is that venture capitalists took a long look at the fediverse and chucked their money at Bluesky instead, because it actually works more similar to “ye olde” social networks — specifically with a business plan, road map and traditional organisational structure.
The parts of the fediverse that I am most inclined toward is too unruly, recalcitrant and noncommercial to attract deeper interest from VC investors. They are deliberately built and organised to resist expectancy of capital return on investments.
So my conclusion is the reverse of what you’d rather not discuss — in my eyes, the fediverse isn’t very good for investors, because until now it’s largely been grassrootsy. It will be interesting to see what VC-friendly platforms emerges in the vein of Bluesky or even Threads, and to what degree they will overlap with the current fediverse.
As far as I know some German states have started tinkering with the Fediverse and invest money in independant and souvereign solutions. At the same time some funds that were previously allocated to open source project funding have been re-allocated to AI and the future of funds like NLnet is uncertain. I see both demand and people trying things. But not a good and coordinated strategy. And it’s been that way for some time now. We’ve seen efforts to move away from Microsoft, closed solutions… Opposition, technical failures and lobbying from big tech (who got money to advertise for their solutions). It’s been a mixed bag. But in some niches it’s become better. And things happen. I think in the near future we’ll see some payoff from already started smaller projects. I don’t really see a big change witing one year, but you never know. Plus we still need to find out where the situation with Bluesky and Elon Musk leads, that certainly got things rolling within a short timeframe.
I doubt venture capital is going to take interest, though. I don’t think there’s money to be made with the Fediverse. I mean it kind of goes against the business model. Unless you lock in people to your website, you can’t display ads to your users. And it goes without saying, that all new platforms are shiny and welcoming at first. They might even advertise with freedom and federation to attract users. Still, they’re free to not follow up with their promises, or add enshittification later on. And it’s a different question whether platforms like Bluesky stay like that in the long term. Usually once venture capital gets involved, they add stuff that goes against the interests of their users and switch to acommodate for the advertisers.
Venture Capital already knows about the Fediverse. The problem is that VCs are actually terrible at taking risks and they will only invest on things once “the market” started paying attention to it.
I’d have thought VC would want to destroy rather than develop the fediverse?
No. It’s quite easy to paint venture capitalists as these cartoonish evil entities that are plotting together against anything that might come to disrupt the status quo, but the reality is that the is no single entity out there coordinating their work. “Venture capitalists” are just a disparate number of people, all of them acting in their own self-interest, and if any of them starting the opportunity for themselves to make money on something, they will do it.
True that. Moneys money.
In theory there’s no overlap and so it’s immune from VC capture.
Corporate social media is proprietary software (mobile and web apps) piggybacking on open internet standards (DNS, HTTP). Capital investment and financial returns are key.
Federated social media is open-source software and (I certainly hope, one day) newly developed open standards and open protocols. Community participation and state regulation are key.
