As Elon Musk’s social media empire shows its decline, Mark Zuckerberg embraces FedEx.
Meta Instagram and threads have joined social media platforms called Fediverse. Basically a federation of independent platforms, FedEx allows users on different servers to communicate with each other.
While commentators and commentators still debate the reasons behind the move, Meta says it was in line with its commitment to decentralization and privacy. A claim that can be somewhat substantiated in the current business climate.
The $200 billion elephant in the room
Threads is Meta's answer to microblogging, a short-form media sharing paradigm where users post and interact with easily digestible snippets of content. X is the undisputed leader in the space with nearly 335 million monthly users by 2024.
However, this number does not tell the whole story. In the year When Elon Musk bought X for $44 billion in October 2022, the social media site had about 368 million monthly users. This represents a decrease of 33 million users or about 10% of the total number of users.
Much of this is due to mask increasing X polarization. Millions of people celebrated the purchase for what they see as a victory for “Internet freedom of speech,” while others shunned X for the right-wing take on the world's most popular microblogging platform.
Fediverse and the future
Many of those who have fled the site have offered decentralized offerings on FedEx — such as Mastodon, Pleroma, and MySky — as a destination for those fleeing Twitter and its new administration.
As it stands, X remains the most popular microblogging site, but it's also clearly on the decline. Both revenue and user count have declined year over year since Musk took over. Although the number of users showed a brief bump in 2023, the subsequent decline wiped out those gains.
Threads, on the other hand, seem to go nowhere but up. It currently has around 130 million active monthly users.
Meta's recent announcement that Threads and Instagram are both joining the Fediverse could be seen as a move to challenge Musk and X's continued centralization.
Musk, the world's richest person (or second-richest person, depending on market activity on any given day), has repeatedly said that his goal with X is to build an “everything app” where users can communicate, create media, transact money and manage things. Their personal and professional products.
FedEx, on the other hand, is a set of decentralized protocols that allow native third-party integration and, as Meta pointed out in a recent blog post, give users control over their data:
“One way to think about FedEx is to compare it to e-mail. You can send e-mail from a Gmail account to a Yahoo account, for example, because those services support the same protocols. Similarly, in a federation you can connect with people using different social networking services built on the same protocol, which connects people and their followers to It removes the silos that limit you to any one platform, but unlike email, your fediverse conversations and profiles are public and can be shared across servers.
As users move away from Musk's centralized Big Tech offerings, the X “everything app,” decentralized offerings like Mastodon offer a different lease on the idea of microblogging. And, arguably, the addition of Threads and Instagram will bring a level of user activity not previously seen in Feediverse.
RELATED: Elon Musk's First Brain Chip Patient Plays Chess Online With His Mind
