2025 Open Social Web Predictions

I just finished looking over my 2024 predictions, and now onto 2025. I try to make these as quantifiable, verifiable and crisp as I can. OK - here goes - in no particular order:

▶️ The ActivityPub based Fediverse as measured by FediDB will grow by 1 million users in 2025 crossing over 12 million users. The BlueSky registered userbase will grow from its current number of 25 million registered users to over 50 million. Both networks will struggle with churn, but monthly active users will not drop below current numbers both see today: 1 Million MAU for Fediverse, and as far as I can find 20 million monthly active users for Bluesky.

▶️ Threads will cross over 600 million monthly active users in 2025. (today it is 300 MM).

▶️ Threads will enable full, two-way Federation in 2025, but will remain opt-in.

▶️ Bluesky developer communities will grow, the number of independent PDS servers will grow, but there will not be any viable options other than the centralized offering rum by BlueSky for Relays and AppViews in 2025.

▶️ There will continue to be waves of users migrating to emerging social media platforms in 2024 and they will primarily be going to Threads, BlueSky, and Mastodon roughly in that order. No new alternative social platforms emerge with any substance in 2025.

▶️ BlueSky and Threads leadership will support BridgyFed to move to “opt out” on its service Bridging over to ActivityPub users and that will launch in 2025 on both platforms. Mastodon will enable each server to choose to be “opt in” or “opt out” of the BridgyFed offering.

▶️ Over 20 percent of “open social web” users will be “bridge enabled” to talk to at least one other protocol by 2025.

▶️ Apps that aggregate the Open Social Web content, such as Flipboard’s “Surf,” or OpenVibe or Tapestry will all be in the top 5 “open social web” apps by download numbers for 2025.

▶️ One other major top 20 US social media service will add Open Social Web support (likely adopting ActivityPub first but with BlueSky support on roadmap)…and it will not be Tumblr.

▶️ Lemmy, Mbin, PieFed, and other content aggregator offerings will have over 250,000 posts in 2025.

▶️ Ghost will launch its 1.0 version of Fediverse support in 2025 and will be in the top 10 of all Fediverse servers by 2025.

▶️ Over 250 thousand federated podcast episodes will be published by 2025 according to FediDB, by Podcast Index, Castopod, and other fediverse enabled podcasters.

▶️ South America and Africa will grow increasingly more relevant to the Open Social Web.

▶️ One new non-microblogging social digital type will launch that does not exist at scale today on the Open Social Web - and it will have over 50,000 registered users in 2025