I think part of the issue with Ello was that they sell themselves as non-corporative social media while maintaining two of the most important characteristics of corporative social media:
- Centralisation and lack of federation
- Being closed-source
The story would have gone completely different if they
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Had made it open-source allowing users to contribute to the project, both as devs and through donations.
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Added decentralisation and federation, allowing others to make their own Ello servers. This could have taken a lot of weight (financial and otherwise) from the developers/founders. Users cost money. Dividing the user base within different servers, pay by and moderated by different people means dividing the costs.
Not only is PixelFed not a competitor in terms of users, but the dev is desperate to cooperate and welcome Meta to the Fediverse. So it doesn’t represent any kind of threat for the company’s goals, at least at the moment.
See how quick he was in defending meta after they came with the bug excuse and how quickly he’s adding threads to the fediverse datebase to the point that the clone of Zuckerberg’s account that cannot even fully interact yet is called “the most popular fediverse account”