Fediverse predictions: manton.org
@manton Yeah I think Ghost could do interesting things.
My assumption had been that Ghost member accounts could also be first class AP accounts.
But you need a “Ghost reader” or similar.
@manton You may be fully right: my 15 million registered users feels less spicy/risky a bet that MAU. For 2 Million users yes, I’m assuming the newer waves of users from loops, or Ghost, or Surf Social, or Wordpress don’t churn as fast as older waves. Will be fun to see what 2026 brings.
@manton And thanks again for the post on this, and 100 % agree with this: “We must continue to adopt a plurality approach, not tied only to the ActivityPub-based fediverse. More platforms should have strong support for RSS and multiple social protocols, rooted in blogs and the broader open web.”
@manton I think if open debate and diversity of thought and political opinion are to thrive, we NEED the Fediverse to not just survive, but keep slowly growing. Bluesky has censorship issues similar to Twitter, but much less diluted.
The fediverse on the other hand can be entirely self hosted (like my account I’m using now), akin to a personal blog, which I also host on the same domain.
The Fediverse however does have a serious on-boarding issue, which is the main advantage centralised social media/platforms like Bluesky have.
@sar If censorship becomes a significant issue, there will be other AT Protocol apps that bypass Bluesky’s filters, so it should be fine. I agree with you on onboarding but would say post portability is also a fediverse problem (specifically with Mastodon). Not a problem with an actual blog.
@manton Oh god yeah, definitely. The ability to move accounts from one server to another is great, but losing all of your posts and content to do so?
In effect all it does is a redirect to your new account and ports followers over. I had to do that a couple of days ago when I moved over to my own self-hosted Masto instance, losing 1700 posts I’d had on Masto.ai previously.
It’s a pain, for sure.
Blogs are brilliant. I’ve had mine for over 26yrs in one format or another. I’m now resident on Ghost, which is linked via ActivityPub. At least that’s static and won’t be having to move.
@manton As you already know, I tend to disagree with you on the “likes and boosts” topic. And I say “tend to” because every so often you almost convince me with your arguments. But when I look at my experience, they work as great discovery features.
I can’t remember the last time I found an account that I started following by reading comments or using the M.b discovery page. But every week I find a few people on Mastodon that I start following.
When I moved from Twitter, I started from scratch, as none of the people I followed there were on the Fediverse at the time. “Likes, boosts, and following tags” were and are still how I came across and started following most of the people I found on the Fediverse.
As a recent experiment, I’ve been following the same accounts on M.b and Mastodon/Bluesky. So far it’s only confirming my perception. I keep finding interesting people to follow only on Mastodon.
As for Bluesky, I see that as the real “Twitter clone”, as companies, influencers, etc., are usually flooding it with posts. That’s where I see reposts and likes as a problem. In other words, I believe it is the type of the original post that makes “reposts and likes” bad for the experience.
The Fediverse has a different posting vibe. I don’t see many companies and influencers, and, even when companies are there, they tend to be very reasonable on their postings.
@manton Adding to my previous comment, “reposts and following tags” are also making me aware of many WordPress sites using the ActivityPub plugin. I’ve been coming across so many great blogs. So, again, it looks like the problem is the quality of the original posts, not the engagement features.
@vladcampos I agree that boosts are good for finding people — they are essentially recommendations from people you already follow — but I don’t want to bring over what I see as the negative consequences of likes and boosts. There is so much more we could do with Discover in Micro.blog first, for example more with starter packs.
@manton Any thoughts on following hashtags? I’m finding it super useful to keep up with specific topics. For example, that’s how I recently found out Syncthing for Android had a problem. Other times, following hashtags bring to my attention posts from people I find interesting and end up following.
@vladcampos Following hashtags might not fit in the main timeline, but I think it could fit in the more complete “feed reader” interface we’re planning. I’ll keep it in mind. (More on that later, nothing announced yet.)