catodon.rocks
Ill try it out thanks!

My personal experience, and I've got a lot of personal experience in this, is that free, open-source, decentralised alternatives are vastly less well-known than those think who know them inside-out.

Most of the time, when people are forced to escape a centralised silo, they tend to move to another centralised silo instead. For it's the centralised silos that are well-known because it's them that tend to have advertisement budgets, it's them that know best how to manipulate Google by SEO means, and it's them that mass media and/or tech media prefer to talk and write about because they're easier to understand.

The majority of Mastodon users don't know anything about the Fediverse beyond Mastodon. For them, the Fediverse is Mastodon. If they had any reason to move away from Mastodon, they'd be stuck between joining Bluesky, going back to X or staying on Mastodon because they don't have the foggiest idea of what else the Fediverse itself has to offer that might suit them better.

Outside of the Fediverse, knowledge about the Fediverse is dominated by

• not even having heard of Mastodon, much less the Fediverse
• having heard of Mastodon, but not of the Fediverse
• having heard of Mastodon and thinking Mastodon is the Fediverse

Another example: Flashback to the early 2010s. People wanted to leave Facebook for greener pastures that didn't snoop on them as egregiously. At first they went nowhere because "there was nowhere to go". Then, when Google+ was launched, they went to Google+. Sure, it was a Google product that definitely would snoop on them. But hey, at least it wasn't Facebook, and Google would probably snoop less than Facebook! Besides, "there was nowhere else to go".

All regardless of diaspora* existing. All regardless of diaspora* shaking up mass media in summer 2010 when the four devs announced a free, non-commercial "Facebook killer" and asked for $12,000 of crowdfunding to develop it, and they got over $200,000. (This is also why the only people who know that Google+ was an all-out diaspora* rip-off are current or former diaspora* users.) All regardless of Friendica existing.

Considering all this, chances that the Pillowfort community has heard of Wafrn are next to nil.

The odds are still very low for a Pillowfort user to know of us, but have to be a huge multiple of the odds for a typical Tumblr user.

I've watched Mastodon and its users for years now. From my experience, for more than 50% of all Mastodon users, the Fediverse equals Mastodon. That doesn't mean that they don't count Lemmy as part of the Fediverse. It rather means that they've literally never even heard about Lemmy. They haven't heard of any Fediverse software other than Mastodon.

There are lots of ATmosphere users who haven't even heard of Mastodon, much less the Fediverse.

Another example: I'm an active user of a virtual world system named OpenSimulator. It's extremely similar to Second Life, also because it uses the same viewers. It's free-as-in-license as well as free-as-in-free-beer and free-as-in-most-grids-don't-even-have-in-world-payment. It's open-source. It's decentralised to the point where your avatar can teleport to other grids (= worlds = server instances). And yet, the vast majority of OpenSim users have never heard of Mastodon either, much less the Fediverse.

Even lemmy.world is viable because they only count server costs, and are volunteer run. If they had to cover staffing costs, it would be untenable.

This is an ongoing problem, we need to figure out a way to make these services sustainable. The donation model obviously isn't cutting it.

That may be a different experience from joining a Wafrn instance where people imported norms from Tumblr. Most of my follows and followers are probably on Mastodon. The selling point for me is that it speaks both ActivityPub and ATProto so it can also interact with BlueSky accounts directly instead of through a relay.

@zloubida@sh.itjust.works @panos@catodon.rocks @fediverse@lemmy.world

I tried it out before then, but it didn't hit for me. I've tried a million alternate ljs and tumblrs, so that says nothing about its quality. If you go on social media and no one wants to talk with you about what you want to talk about, it seems like a waste of time and effort.

It's a shame when independent projects like this close down, but if not enough people stepped up to help when help was needed, burnout was inevitable, and burnout can only be ignored for so long. Better to close it down like this than in a more dramatic way.

The type of people who went on pillowfort might actually be interested in fediverse alternatives. They'll reconnect on dreamwidth, probably, and post where they can be found. If Wafrn has what pillowfort users want and, more importantly, if their friends from there want to try it out with them, it could be a healthy boost of furries, lady fandom nerds, and lgbt+ people to the fediverse.