I legitimately believe that if ActivityPub services had gained traction before the dotcom bubble, they would be the default today, and twitter/bsky/reddit etc would have to go above and beyond to convince people to used their siloed platforms.
Strong agree. Email is prolific because it is the proto social network infrastructure, and it has interoperability at its core. You have someones email, you can write them. Theoretically it doesn't matter what email you send it from, you can send an email to any address in the world. There are limits to this these days, because of things like DMARC, DKIM, and SPF, which have been introduced because of shortcomings in the open protocols, but in its purest form, there are no barriers.
If ActivityPub had been around at the same time as email, it would be considered infrastructure the same way email is today. The online world would look different, but don't neglect that industries are still finding ways to make money from email. There might not have been platforms like the social media silos we have today, but there might be an industry trying to milk ActivityPub for money.
I’m hoping this is the phenomenon that is the best chance for the fediverse’s future, because every time one of the platforms dies off some small percentage of the userbase switches to a fediverse alternative. And a protocol won’t fail like a private service will. So over time, the more often private services fail, the more users find the fediverse, the larger it gets, and the more people notice that it’s the most dependable way to go. It might take 100 years for a critical mass of people to figure it out, but I think in the long term, the fediverse will eventually be seen as “old reliable”.
I too subscribe to this hope. I always end up writing emails to people I haven't been in touch with for a long time, and aren't sure about which phone number, social network, or physial address they are currently reachable on. Which reminded me of this post:
https://my-notes.dragas.net/2023/09/25/25-years-later/
Email just (still) works. Can't ask for more than that.
Statistics don't back up that argument though. While the Olympics may not sell out completely, the percentage of tickets sold relative to tickets available has been 90% or more since the 2008 Summer Olympics.