[cehrlich]

One thing I'd be curious to know is how large the current open platforms are compared to those of 20+ years ago. The internet as a whole is so much bigger that it's hard to maintain a sense of scale.

For example, how many people are using Matrix now, compared to IRC 20 years ago? IRC had 10M users in 2003 [1], Matrix has 28M 'global visible accounts', but who knows what that means.

Maybe it's ok for these platforms to remain 'small', growing slowly. Sure we'd all love to win the fight for a free internet tomorrow, but it's also important to maintain a realistic perspective.

Disclaimer: Usenet is still growing, but I presume that's just alt.binary - According to Wikipedia [1] it had 15M daily posts in 2010, and 171M daily posts in 2021.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(protocol) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

[hammyhavoc]

53m global visible accounts as of March, mate. https://twitter.com/matrixdotorg/status/1505009553884205063?...

It means exactly what it says. We don't know how many people in European governments, militaries, healthcare etc use it, but we know that they use it, though that information is not possible to discover publicly. We can see how many public accounts there are.

Usenet is predominantly piracy at this point.