Fediverse

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.

Well, the Pixelfed dev is apparently being pestered by VC funders right now.

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.

They already know, it's just fediverse developers are radically anit-VC so reject any offers out of principle.

How would you make money if you can't control the platform? Investing in the fediverse is a terrible investment case.

Facebook's Threads already exists, so I guess they discovered it last year

Instead of writing the same answer to all sceptics, I'll just write one answer here:

I believe that you greatly overestimate the rationality of VC at a micro level and greatly underestimate the number of business cases that can be made on top of popular open standards. Developing a fediverse software like Pixelfed is basically free if you're with the big money. The question is if it will hurt your other investments and strategy. Right now it looks like the answer is "no". The risk of putting too many eggs in the oligarch basket seems quite high.

Is it not possible to make money of the internet because you don't own the infrastructure and the standards are open?

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.

Daniel the developer has received 4 venture capitalist offers for Pixelfed.

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.

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.

What? Why? How? What?

There's no reason monetisation can't be built into the Fediverse as it is. Ghost is looking like a good replacement for Substack for those that want to monetise their blog/newsletter. Flohmarkt is a Fediverse classified ads service. I don't think it'll be long before we see an Fediverse Patreon or eBay, for example, I just suspect the early Fediverse adopters have been so anti-capitalist that they have either rejected such things or overlooked them entirely. However, it'll be key for getting content creators to move over to the Fediverse as they'll want to keep their income stream.

In the meantime, more attention on the Fediverse should mean grant money flows in and crowd funding takes off.