And he wants to market it as his own, original, scratch-made, “nothing even close to this has ever only even been attempted before” creation.
And because almost nobody outside the Fediverse has ever heard about anything in the Fediverse, he’ll succeed. To the point where people will laugh about Mastodon being a Haven Social rip-off because they’ve heard of Haven Social first and Mastodon later.
These odds are still extremely slim. Even if there was one Pillowfort user who has heard of Wafrn, that one voice wouldn’t be loud enough to reach the whole crowd in time before they all move to something that’s nothing like Tumblr or Pillowfort (e.g. Mastodon, Bluesky). And I don’t think that there are that many more people on Pillowfort who have heard of Wafrn. Especially considering how few people on Mastodon, much less Lemmy, have heard of it.
Is the Pillowfort community discussing a collective move to the Fediverse, to someplace in the Fediverse that is not Mastodon, to someplace in the Fediverse that has largely got the same features as Tumblr?
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
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.
Not likely enough, though.
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.
I bet that next to nobody on Pillowfort has ever heard of the Fediverse, and that absolutely nobody has ever heard of anything else in the Fediverse than Mastodon.
Also, Threads has introduced extremely strict rules for servers that want to federate.
Entire Fediverse server applications are incapable of following all these rules, either technologically or by concept.
For example, IIRC, Threads demanded a full public timeline. Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte do have that feature in code. But it’s intentionally turned off server-wide by default, and there’s a very good reason for this and for just about no serious admins of public servers ever turning it on.