So I am a big fan of the Fediverse, I love the idea of decentralisation and I believe this is how the future of social media should be. But here starts the problem.
All my friends are using Instagram or TikTok or else. I didnt think of that while I also used Instagram, but I think they are highly addicted. Its not possible for them to not use Instagram for at least 1h when we meet up. When I still used Instagram, I was part of the problem. But now that I left it a couple of months ago, I just realised the problem I used to live in.
Addiction is all about realising you are addicted, but I find it very hard to address the problem. I dont want to harm our friendship over social media and I am afraid that when I tell them about their addiction, they will not agree and find it impolite.
So I believe that social media can only survive if the people use it. Its all about user generated content and while the Fediverse is doing better than ever, it still needs more users ASAP.
How can we achieve getting those people on the Fediverse and, more importantly, hold them here, while they slowly get less addicted to social media and see the potential of the Fediverse.
Thank you for reading and for thinking about possible answers. I wrote the whole text by myself, this is not AI generated.
It also adds that most people who are “invested” in the Fediverse don’t realize to what absurd degree the notion of caring about decentralization or open source doesn’t matter to many people they try to get interested. For whom their problems are “We need more formula for the kid” or “Shit I gotta visit the family on the weekend and that’s also the only days we could possibly work on getting that leaking pipe fixed, ever”.
People have problems that need fixes. Their social media being a centralized one isn’t a problem to them - it works right now. It’s a solved problem. Trying to inject another problem to care about into their life will often actively aggravate people, and for understandable reasons: They got enough of them already.
Plus, in particular in current times, very serious very IRL issues. On multiple levels. Caring about Reddit vs Piefed or so is so far down the list, to most it feels ludicrous that this ought to be an issue to anybody at all.
That’s why when I tell people about MULTIVERSE, I tell them it doesn’t have ads, and the devs ain’t using your data to rig the US presidential election.
That’s what normal people care about.
Yeah, the Fediverse needs different ways to promote itself. Very few people give a flying flip about decentralization or open source, but some people might be interested in:
-Giving less power to Sam Altman (partial owner of Reddit), Zuck, Musk et. al
-Not having everything you post directly given to OpenAI for AI training
-Lack of psychologically manipulative algorithms
-Fewer ads
-Different moderation, maybe (if someone has had issues with being threatened on Xitter or having posts auto-removed somewhere or something)
-More human interactions
You’re still not going to get most people to move over based on those things, but you might get more.
Tbh, most wouldn’t care much
Make it easier to understand, say “The stuff you post will not be give to AIs or that kind of bullshit”
They will not care that much about this tbh, if they do care mention it tho
Mmh i mean yeah, for the most part but at the same time not completely, lemmy.world and other instances have bots that remove and/or ban you using simple regex, which ignores the context but it’s also unbelively more easy to appeal a ban (for now)