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.
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i’m a non-technical user and it is a pretty awkward position to be in tbh. i have been floating around various fediverse platforms for quite some years now and it is just very isolating. i can do all the right things in terms of curation and maybe find a tiny handful of cool people but i am still missing out on things like information about local community events, because a huge proportion of those pretty much only get posted on instagram.
so for me it is not even about friends being on there or needing to yap at brands but like…when is the popup art market on, oh there is a call for volunteers for beach cleanup, there is a blood drive on, the tattoo shop i like has a flash day coming up. and before someone yells at me: i dont currently have an instagram account and havent for a while now. but like…i do miss having access to that sort of information because it would get me out of the apartment and involved in local community events. and now i never know what is going on in my city and don’t go out as much. :/
so yay for not using evil meta bullshit that is increasingly janky and many kinds of fucked up. but like. if i had friends over on insta as well, it would make switching to a fedi platform a very hard sell: “come to this place where your friends are not, and probably no local information is available, and people will be continually pissy at you for not caring enough about technical things, and almost nobody wants to hear about the things you are interested in, and people dont want you there anyway because the low userbase is considered a feature not a bug”. ya know? it is just a non-starter.
there are good things about fedi platforms too, but some of those good things are things normal people will simply not understand or care about no matter how frustrated it makes technical users. i wouldnt tell a friend to come here, i would simply tell them to use what they are using less often. and i am sure there will be people in this very thread thinking “good, we dont want idiots like you here”, and that is indeed another part of why it is isolating for me to be here. :)
Thank you for your answer. I want to start telling you, that your opinion on the whole topic is one of the most valuable answers.
You are the exact kind of people the fediverse needs and are adressing a couple of real issues the fediverse needs to work on. Helping small communities finding a way, maby to start briding their content over to the fediverse as easy as possible. I think we need to start giving people like you an option to come here and stay here. Without loosing their access to their community.
In my opinion the fediverse lack of users is not a feautre. Its one of the worst things and it needs to fight that issue. And this is exactly where we need to find answers. And is it really a thing that people will argue on here because they still use instagram or sth else?? Wtf!? We should be happy for every user trying to join the fediverse.
Maby talk to your community, If you want to help your community, maby start creating fediverse accounts for them.
Maby telling them about crossposting, that they can, if they want, post their activies throughout multiple social media at the same time, so as many people as possible can see it. Well its getting more technically, I apologize!
Honestly, yeah.
For certain niches, the Fediverse is great - but it absolutely does suck for local community stuff.
Big tech platforms make those hyper-niche communities easier to set up, in exchange for all that sweet sweet data - and that won’t change anytime soon.
To do that on Fediverse you’d probably have to host an instance and get people to sign up if they aren’t already. Which for a techy or privacy orientated group they might actually do - but I don’t picture most hobbiest groups having the technical know-how or want to do that.
Maybe one day enough of the population will become tech-savy or privacy aware that niche local community Fedi instances might actually become a thing - but that day certainly isn’t today
yes, ideally i would love for many local city councils to set up their own instances that local orgs, council services, businesses, and individuals can have relatively stable accounts on without having to worry about inter-instance fedi lore or trying to work out hosting for themselves when they aren’t confident in technical matters. but unfortunately that’s quite pie-in-the-sky dreaming right now!
Tell them to turn on fediverse sharing in the Threads account they already have.
I can already hear “No! Not like that!”. Fair enough, but that’s the thing most of your non-technical friends will actually do if you ask them. Be sure you have an account somewhere that can interact with it. Perhaps some will get interested enough to make accounts somewhere better.
People have strange and strong brand loyalty for proprietary things. It’s like a culture for them. I have seen it especially on iPhone and Whatsapp. Not only they refuse to use alternatives (Android; RCS/Signal/XMPP etc.). They will think you are a loser if you don’t use them. Or, even worse, will try to convince you to use them and that those are the best and anything else is a shit. I believe it’s the same for social media. So good luck!
People act similarly for stuff like Linux though. Gotta build a cool brand for the Fediverse!
Of course. Mac OS users will tell that you are so poor/stingy to buy an Apple computer, and Windows users to buy a Windows license. I left Windows, Reddit, X and Whatsapp 3 years ago. Switched to GNU/Linux, Lemmy, Mastodon and Signal/XMPP/SimpleX/DeltaChat. Best tech decisions I made. I hope more people will join Free/Federated technology. :-)
Does Fediverse even have what your friends want from a social media? Even the answer is yes, share that content with them and hope they will be intrigued. Unfortunately, the most likely is no in this case. Fediverse is only good for like five topics and everything else is “too niche”.
It would change if we had more people on here but the problem is, Fediverse just isn’t appealing to most people. They don’t care about decentralization and open-source. What they do care about though is algorithms and low barrier to entry - and neither need is fulfilled by the Fedi.
We are truly the Linux of social media haha.
What they do care about though is algorithms and low barrier to entry - and neither need is fulfilled by the Fedi.
Well there is https://quiblr.com/
https://quiblr.com/understanding_your_private_personalized_feed
Not sure if something similar exists for microblogging platforms. I can’t believe someone hasn’t made a Mastodon app/frontend that does this, or a fork of Misskey/Sharkey with an algorithm built in. Are the microblogging platforms even trying to build features to bring in new users? Lol
the Linux of social media
😂 I love it So the answer is to create an algorithm for the fediverse?
It absolutely is, and it’s harder than it seems.
Content curation and the “discovery problem” (which includes the algorithms of how we deliver search, feeds, recommendations, related content, news, current events, and more) of how people discover new-to-them content is a genuine and important problem. In fact, I believe it’s so important that even the people who acknowledge it as a serious problem in places like the fediverse and the open web are generally underestimating how fundamentally important and challenging it actually is. It’s a foundational and crucial prerequisite for any sort of information sharing and that gives it so much more significance that I think people struggle to actually follow how its ripples turn into waves. And it’s a very hard one to solve, unfortunately.
(Editor’s note: I begin descending into meandering philosophical nonsense beyond this point, proceed at your own risk.)
Without tackling that problem, which is still a largely unsolved problem at scale, and preferably doing so honestly (unlike the manipulative big tech engagement-farming, advertisement-selling “solutions” to this problem) we’re always going to end up building disparate and disconnected silos of information that most people will never gain access to. And we all suffer because of that. We have come so close to tapping into the collective and cumulative knowledge that humanity and civilization has built up to this point, and now we are fighting against something similar to the last-mile problem of how do we actually enable all humanity to access and build on it. This requires both access and education, and it’s hugely challenging, massively widespread and most of the time people can’t even see the forest for the trees when it comes to this. We are on the verge of something genuinely transformative for civilization, and unlike the hype it’s not all doomsday scenarios about AI taking over and killing all humans, it’s about finding ways of giving real humans direct or indirect access to the overwhelming library of information that other humans have spent millennia building into a globe-spanning technological empire. That’s the transformative part.
It’s not about the success of companies or nations, it’s about how effective we are at giving information to other humans, it’s always been about that. The myth of Prometheus is sort of misleading. The person who actually changed the course of humanity’s future isn’t the one who first learned about fire (or any other tool we’ve learned to use), nor the one who discovered how to reliably create or use fire. In fact, there were probably many, many such people throughout humanity’s history, but they either died with the knowledge or kept it secret and hidden until it died out again after a few generations when they refused to share it and others became jealous or threatened by it. They achieved little. The person who actually changed humanity’s future is the person who, with that information, decided to teach it openly to someone else, not as magic or as a secret, but as something they could understand, something that became part of cultural practices, oral traditions, recorded histories, got turned into tools and equipment or some other form of institutionalized knowledge, something that people could then re-use and teach to the people who came after them, and let it spread from there to more and more people. Everything we have ever built is built entirely on top of education, teaching, documenting, and sharing information with others and thus with future generations and sustaining the information, building systems like language and writing to sustain that information further. Whenever that information comes to a dead end, it is lost, sometimes forever, and that’s not a cautionary tale, that can happen, it does happen, it has happened. Even recently. Our success and progress is measured by our ability to transfer our knowledge, not by the knowledge we have at any given moment. Dumping our collective creativity and thoughts and independent research into an unsearchable, disorganized pile to be archived, forgotten and lost serves no-one. But how do we share it with others? How do we distill it so that the endless firehose of what’s available still provides the information we need but doesn’t hit us with brutal, overwhelming amounts of it? That’s the fundamental question.
Honestly I think that’s one thing we could learn from BSky. They have algorithms but they’re created and shared by the community. Basically “choose your own algorithm”.
Honestly, the lack of a decent algorithm is why I stopped using Mastodon. It’s not a problem on lemmy since up- and downvotes are the algorithm, but for all other fediverse services it’s what keeps me away.
The difference is that this doesn’t mean I’m on Insta or Twitter, just that this here is basically all social-media I do.
Loops has an algorithm. It growth is laughtable
Inertia is a hell of a thing. Also TikTok has one of the most efficient algorithms of any social media, and I doubt it would be easily replicated. Especially if you’re doing it in the classic Fediverse spirit of trying to be non-invasive, non-addictive, caring for the users’ privacy etc.
I feel like it’s both niche and not niche enough. Reddit has subreddits for all sorts of book series I enjoy but fediverse, if it has them at all, is largely empty of activity competitively.
Yeah, Lemmy/Fediverse has a very specific brand of niche and very few others. I’m missing those book/media-related communities here too. Fedi needs more niches.
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.
Giving less power to Sam Altman (partial owner of Reddit), Zuck, Musk et. al
Tbh, most wouldn’t care much
Not having everything you post directly given to OpenAI for AI training
Make it easier to understand, say “The stuff you post will not be give to AIs or that kind of bullshit”
Lack of psychologically manipulative algorithms
They will not care that much about this tbh, if they do care mention it tho
Different moderation, maybe (if someone has had issues with being threatened on Xitter or having posts auto-removed somewhere or something)
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)
My chosen, tender way to motivate non tech people to leave big Tech platforms for the fediverse is to post sth nice (nice pics, family info,…) on Friendica, Pixelfed or Lemmy, and then paste the link on Facebook, so that my Facebook friends see it, like what they see, get curious what’s that strange platform they had never heard of, register.
Problem 1: Sometimes FB shows the linked posts picture, sometimes it doesn’t. Problem 2: Some instances deactivate that content can be shown by external platforms like FB.
So far I did it three times; 1 (my friendica instance) didn’t show the pic though. So far, the success count is still on 0. But I still hope it will work :)
I really love that approach!! Thank you, I will try to do the same with my friends.
Cool, keep me posted on your success and on your experiences / ideas for improvement of the concept!
