@Graham Ward This has a variety of reasons.

One, Friendica hasn't been big or well-known to begin with. Honestly, did you even know it exists prior to mid-January?

Two, if you go by registered accounts rather than active accounts, Friendica is small because it is an old Friendica tradition to purge accounts that haven't been in use for a while. So while you may have millions of Mastodon accounts from late 2022 that are now unused, there are barely any unused Friendica accounts.

Three, not as many people leave Facebook as Instagram. Instagram is social media, it's all about having followers and posting media. It doesn't matter much who follows you. Facebook is a social network. It's all about being in contact with those whom you already know anyway. If they aren't in the Fediverse/on Friendica, their real-life friends don't move to Friendica either.

Four, a significant number of Facebook refugees is railroaded over to Mastodon, often without even being told that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon. The railroading is done either by those who still think the Fediverse is only Mastodon themselves or by fundamentalist Mastodon fans who want everyone to be on Mastodon.

Five, of those who are both on Mastodon and Facebook, many who try Friendica expect either an all-out Facebook clone, just like they expected Mastodon to be an all-out Twitter clone, or they expect Mastodon with more characters and groups. But they find Friendica to be neither and instead something new and "quirky" to get used to yet again. Once they learn that you can follow Friendica accounts from Mastodon, they stop their Friendica experiment again.

Six and finally, there's no app for Friendica in the Apple App Store. Simple as that. Friendica on the iPhone means either a Mastodon app and a very very limited subset of Friendica's features or the Web interface. But many iPhone users won't touch a Web browser with a 10-foot barge pole.

The alternatives don't matter much. They are mainly Friendica's own descendants, Hubzilla (a hyper-massive feature monster with the Eiger North Face of learning curves and not even a functional Android app, not to mention that only few people have even heard of it) and (streams) (easier to get into than Hubzilla, but still even harder than Friendica, extremely obscure to the point of being practically unknown outside of itself and Hubzilla, with only two open-registration instances that are impossible to find and with no support for native mobile apps whatsoever). Neither of them really cuts into the numbers of people who move from Facebook to Friendica.

And Matrix is not an alternative to Facebook. It's an alternative to WhatsApp, Telegram and Discord. It's instant messaging.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Facebook #FacebookAlternative #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Matrix