I actually hope the fediverse doesn't grow too rapidly. Otherwise we will also be forced to implement age verification.

Currently not looking too good... We have a pretty constant 1 million active users. Despite all the previous enshittification of mainstream social media. But yeah, that's the spirit 👍

I just hope they don't all go to "lemmy.world" or some huge instance. Regardless, even the @eucommission is understanding the value of the fediverse and has its own mastodon instance. The German government is also going more opensource, the Dutch government wants to have an alternative to GitHub that might join the fediverse, France has the DINUM which seems to want to aggressively leave US big tech behind.

One big problem I see with the EU finally noticing opensource is that they are new to the game and will take lobbying money. Solutions like BlueSky might easily lead them astray, but I seriously hope they will see "developed by USAians" and go "fuck that, we want Mastodon that's spearheaded by a German non-profit".

It's very imaginable that more duds like BlueSky will pop up to distract from the fediverse and try to grab a piece of the monetary and attention pie the EU has.

I'm actually afraid the opposite might actually happen.

if users (especially new potential users to the Fediverse.) find that social media requires them to id verifiy most of them will probably just either stick to a narrow smaller few of sites they know people use, or they'l obsolete themselves from the social media aspects of the internet entirely.

Doubtful - Lemmy's userbase continues to shrink or at best hold steady, and while PieFed continues to keep doubling in size, its total subscriber count remains a moderate fraction of Lemmy's.

On the other hand, the tools keep getting better - excruciatingly slowly, but consistently nonetheless.