I joined DeSo back in February 2022 when a friend of mine posted about it on Facebook. I thought it was a really cool and interesting concept and was feeling a bit bored of Facebook and Twitter at the time.

Over the course of about a year, I amassed a small following just shy of 750. I was very active and posting almost every day for several months, and for a time there was an uptick in engagement last summer, but then it slowly dwindled down in the Fall and has continued this trend.

Back in May, I made a post that I would be largely abandoning the platform as there wasn't enough engagement to hold my interest anymore. Using DeSo had become a chore and filled me with a sense of sadness because I saw what it could have been and just how far off that mark it had fallen.

This past Fall, Twitter had a shake up when Elon Musk purchased it for an inordinate amount of money. Many users did not like the way he was running the platform and wanted to jump ship. I thought it was the perfect time for DeSo to do a huge push for new users. However, they didn't even seem to try. I watched as many of my friends tried jumping to Mastodon and Hive with middling success. I suggested DeSo to some, but they did not understand it or see enough of a userbase to get on board with it. It was disappointing to see such a massive opportunity for the DeSo platform just completely wasted and ignored. Instead, they continued focusing on their internal exchange rather than the social aspects of what is supposed to be Decentralized Social.

In the past couple months, there has been another large move of existing Twitter users trying to jump platforms. This time to BlueSky, which is incredibly similar to Twitter in how it functions but is still in beta and missing many features and doesn't have a large user base due to it being invite only. But even with those barriers, it has significantly more user engagement than DeSo. I feel like this was their last chance to pull in more users, but they still didn't even try.

Now we have Threads, and whether you like it or not, it is a huge success. It's bigger than DeSo, Mastodon, Hive, and BlueSky put together. And before long it will be larger than Twitter.

It's just really sad to have seen two windows of massive opportunity for DeSo to have some mainstream success, and it got squandered both times. I'm afraid they may be out of chances and are on their way out. It was fun while it lasted...