Thanks for this. I hadn’t thought about the categories but they do help when thinking about markets. Your point about very different people is a big one as well. Being social creatures, I imagine people follow their friends wherever when they see them having more fun “over there.”
These lists are great. I played around with some of the numbers in the fediverse.party git and was surprised to find more networks (aardwolf, ganggo, postactiv) that made appearances over the past few years.
It would be interesting to survey people on how they chose the platform/server they’re on. How many were via a directory, how many followed a friend, or read a story or did a random web search. Data collection seems to be a challenge but if the value is clear and data anonymized, then it should be possible to provide better guidance on growth.
And doesn’t this sum up FOSS development at large.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Pieter Hintjens and I really liked his focus on problem solving. Devs like to solve their own problems. There’s also a philosophy he fostered in ZeroMQ of minimal sanity checking + merge everything which helps devs feel valued. If they submit a PR it’s not going to be perfect, but with linters and tests and an aggressive bias toward merging, they’ll know what they’re getting into when they press the button… and it pushes the quality enforcement to the edge node (the dev) which I find much better aligned to decentralized systems than epic discussions happening in github issues.
Maybe taking decentralization to the core of the development process, removing any sort of social gatekeeping could help bring more devs in, among other things. Might just be that it’s what I’m listening to now so everthing’s a nail. 