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.
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.
They already know, it’s just fediverse developers are radically anit-VC so reject any offers out of principle.
That’s great!
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.
How can you make money of the internet if you don’t own all infrastructure and control all standards? I promise, there are countless businesses cases.
See all the open source projects that immediately forked off whenever they get bought by a big company. Although it mostly seems to be Oracle that never learns from this.
Facebook’s Threads already exists, so I guess they discovered it last year
Daniel the developer has received 4 venture capitalist offers for Pixelfed.
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?
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.
