Matrix has 20+ million users, and is federated.

ok, then reddit problem is solved. Or not because they solve different problem and need very different infra?..

There are social network UIs written for Matrix the same way ActivityPub is used for Lemmy and Mastodon and Flickr-clones. I expect these to multiply as the protocol gains more features too. Recent Matrix enhancements are about modeling content relationships, seemingly to this end.

And yes, the entire foundation structure of the platform and protocol are quite different, that's kinda the point. ActivityPub and Matrix protocol are similar in this regard. And yes the AP impls are seeing huge explosions in growth in the last 3 weeks

> protocol are quite different, that's kinda the point

I am not familiar with all those projects, but my understanding is that reddit's moats are:

- infra which can serve significant traffic over petabytes of content with search and recommendation on top of them

- they have bootstrapped content volume and communities

- they have monetization in place which pays for all infra and salaries

how far mentioned projects from that state?

> infra which can serve significant traffic over petabytes of content with search

Search? Reddit search is so bad it’s practically a meme. They only added the ability to search within comments (y’know, like 90% of the site) _this year_.

https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/11dgwzy/whats_up_wi...

> they have bootstrapped content volume and communities

Do you mean when the founders (including current CEO) posted as a bunch of fake users to create the illusion that it was popular?

https://venturebeat.com/social/reddit-fake-users/

> they have monetization in place which pays for all infra and salaries

How is possible if Reddit has never been profitable/reached breakeven?

https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762868/reddit-ceo-steve...

I don't see you refuted anything, they still have infra for lots of data with search and recommendation, bootstrapped content and communities and generate good chunk of revenue, and reaching this point will take good amount of effort for rivals.