Meta Has a Pixelfed Problem (But Really, a Growth Problem)

=> Meta Is Blocking Links to Decentralized Instagram Competitor Pixelfed | Meta says it was mistakenly blocking links to Instagram competitor Pixelfed | 'Year of intensity': Meta employees react to plans to cut low performers | Meta's pivot to the right sparks boycotts and a user exodus

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, it was something of a testament to your brilliance as a developer if you interviewed with what we now call FAANGs (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) and got the job. A gold star on your resume, so to speak. I know a few people who made the long journey south; actually, most of the people I know who applied to one of those companies ended up getting a job. One guy at Amazon, a couple at Google, one of my university friends and his wife at Microsoft (which, granted, isn't in Silicon Valley, but you get the idea).

It was never for me. The only time I was tempted was at the very start of my degree, in the waning days of the dot com boom, when someone I knew from a forum said I should come down, he'd show me around, introduce me to some people. I thought about it - honestly. Defeated, coming out of a relationship ghosted and heartbroken, it seemed to me like it could be a fresh start. That fall, as I started my second year of undergraduate studies, and hit a wall, struggling with my studies, I thought about it even harder.

I'd eventually move across the country a half-decade later, but that was for love, not for work. And maybe it would have worked out. Maybe not. But my life would've been very different, and I'm glad I didn't end up going down to San Francisco. I ended up taking a more conventional approach to my career. In my early 20s I threw myself at my work, and then after a half-dozen years at my first job, realized that the grind wasn't for me. If you die, they'll replace you. If you burn out, they'll replace you. If you underperform - buddy, you'd better believe that they'll replace you. I remember seeing projects go poorly, developers singled out, brusquely showed the door. Smart people, too, and in a job that, I'd find out later, was woefully underpaying its devs. But that was the era. At the time, stack ranking was very much in vogue. There were whispers our own company was doing it, later confirmed. I spent most of my 20s chasing the promotions I wanted but which wouldn't be granted. I remember waking up one day and just thinking, what the fuck is the point of this?

I'm dumb but I can improve. I wised up, jumping ship for a similar position at another company, where the environment was less bro-ish, and where within a couple years I'd get the promotion I was after. I was leaned on, I did good work, and it felt good to have people finally notice.

A few years after that, the FAANGs came knocking, recruiters reaching out to see if I'd be interested in applying for this position, or that. I remember the one from Facebook, and by then, it was 2017 or so. The era of the Rohingya genocide in Burma, the era of Cambridge Analytica, any shine the company had in the early 2010s now well and truly gone. I remember seeing a Facebook recruiter in my LinkedIn DMs, and turning up my nose. I was polite, told her I wasn't interested, good luck filling the role. I'm a coward. What I wanted to say was:

Hi [recruiter],

Thanks for reaching out!

I'd rather die.

=> Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Top-Secret Hawaii Compound

It feels like in the last few years, it's somehow gotten worse. Massive layoffs in 2023, Zuckerberg declaring a "year of efficiency" despite shovelling literal billions of dollars into his Wii-assed Metaverse dream. Efficiency for thee, but not for me. I've been thinking about that as I read the latest news about him, about the company he'll never leave: that Meta has pledged a million dollars to Trump's second inauguration, that he's building a sprawling survivalist bunker in Hawaii, that he's now declared another year, this one a "year of intensity", and has stated a desire to cut the lowest performing 5% of the company.

Among all the software developers I know, Meta is repellant. Anathema. Poison. No longer the shiny company that made the compelling social network that captured the public's imagination in the 2000s, it has become a big, faceless corporation. Yet Another Tech Company. A slightly-younger Cisco. The same stink as Oracle. IBM in a hoodie.

It seems like a lot of people have taken notice. Zuckerberg, very briefly humanized, for maybe a year or two, when Musk bought Twitter and made him look sort of normal in comparison, is now firmly a villain again. And not the creepy, dead-eyed nerd with a weird ancient Rome fixation who stared at Congressmen and sipped his water very awkwardly. No, now he's a broccoli-topped, gold-chained, gym bro nerd, who wears baggy t-shirts with classical Latin or ancient Greek on them, who...you get the idea. And so just as people were looking for an out in Twitter when Musk made it (even more) toxic, people have started doing the same now with Facebook and Instagram.

Luckily for Meta, there's no ready and up-and-running alternative to Facebook and Instagram. But if they're fortunate enough to not have a Bluesky gathering steam, there's still that pesky thorn in their side: the collective Fediverse, who, generally speaking, really don't like Meta.

People started posting about pixelfed on their platforms and found just as quickly that any discussion of the Fediverse photo-sharing platform was quickly marked as spam, and then removed. Kind of a bad look, and when you consider the size of the platforms, just a terrible one overall. Banning links to pixelfed reeks of insecurity, the kind that Musk displayed when he blocked links to Mastodon, and then Bluesky. And let's be fair: Mastodon was never going to be the world's microblogging site. I'd be glad to be wrong, but I can't see pixelfed occupying the same mindspace that Instagram does, that Flickr might've briefly used to.

=> Number of monthly active Facebook users worldwide as of 4th quarter 2023

But you can see why Zuckerberg's platforms forbid talk of alternatives: Meta has a very big growth problem. It has, in the past, experienced incredible growth; but with 3 billion active monthly users, it may have reached a kind of hard limit. Almost everyone has, or has had, a Facebook account. There's not a huge amount of people still to get, and most of those who've abandoned it aren't coming back. And that's where I think things are going to get interesting in the coming years. Because as a publicly-traded company, Facebook has to keep aggressively pursuing growth. That's why there's been a parade of half-thought-out ideas, each quickly turned around and forgotten: the waist-up, genital-less metaverse; and now AI users and bots to fill in the white noise on the timeline. (We'll see how long this lasts.)

=> Mark Zuckerberg can sack 11,000 workers but shareholders can’t dump him: it’s called ‘management entrenchment’

But in the end, Meta has a Mark Zuckerberg problem: he controls 57% of voting stock, and therefore can only be removed by himself. Rather than some bold titan of industry, he's shown that he's the same person he's always been, the creepy comp sci major who built a Hot Or Not clone to rate the fuckability of his unsuspecting peers. My prediction: the company will continue, year after year, to stall out on growth. Investors will start to sell. The news feed will become, somehow, inexplicably, worse than it is now, filled with AI chatter and images that will leave you gasping for any signal of life from your friends. Sign-ups will stall. People will leave. I don't think pixelfed is it, or the Fediverse either: people have collectively decided they're too hard, and it's not worth trying. But someone will come out with something different. I don't know if it'll be revolutionary. Maybe it'll be stripped down. Share your photos, apply some filters (sound familiar?), What's Going On? Want to see some cool events around you? Nothing but your friends and people you follow. What it used to be before you sighed and added Mike from Accounting as a Friend. What we wanted then. And maybe, just maybe, what we might have again.

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