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 pretty active poster & reader over on Mastodon and think the Fediverse is neat. That said, people who share my interests (vintage signage, 1970s punk rock / new wave, old monster movies, etc.) pretty much only hang out on Instagram, and do all their image sharing and commenting over there. The more general “this is my lifestyle” people head where the action is, and it ain’t here.
Follow all the steps in https://runyourown.social/ , whether you run your own instance or not. The fediverse is fundamentally a reimagination of our social links, so it’s the occasion to do things differently. Get your friends together in a room and create accounts for each other, browse together, show each other what you discover. Create a private community just for your group to exchange stuff in there that on. This is a social “job” and it needs people keeping it alive, that is you in the beginning before the whole fediverse can do it
If anyone knew, you wouldn’t have to ask. Everyone’d already been here.
My friends know the fediverse. But why should they switch, when they are addicted to the algorithm?
They should switch BECAUSE they’re addicted to the algorithm :D
Maybe start a discussion about how being addicted to Instagram isn’t a great use of time and recommend Pixelfed as a less addictive alternative.
Do they want to make the switch? If they don’t, they won’t.
You can’t force or convince the mainstream to get to the Fediverse when pretty much all of their connections are on the mainstream network.
That’s why I think Lemmy/Piefed are the ones that have a biggest chance of sticking, because they’re aimed to a public that’s not necessarily mainstream.
I know they exist and I totally respect it, but I’m not even sure if it makes much of a sense an Instagram/TikTok alternative on the Fediverse, considering these social media are aimed around getting visibility either by personal relationship or by popularity (volume over quality). And I don’t think that the Fediverse public as of now is looking to become that.
You don’t.
So will it always be a niche? Does the fediverse even try to get to the mainstream?
I think, unless the big players are forced out of business (either by law or by a BIG societal shift) it has simply no chance to win over the mainstream. At least not worldwide… in the EU it might stand a bit of a chance but even that is more wishful thinking on my part.
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. :-)
We’ve already got this in the Fediverse.
Most Mastodon users are fully convinced that Mastodon is the best, and nothing in existence can beat it in any way possible. They defend their “Mastodon Fediverse” against “inferior, barbaric, culture-less intruders” like Akkoma or Sharkey or Friendica tooth and nail. They absolutely refuse to accept that something, anything in the Fediverse can be better than Mastodon at anything. Of course, when they get people into the Fediverse, they railroad them straight into Mastodon, and they intentionally say nothing about the rest of the Fediverse.
Only those who actually start daily-driving something else than Mastodon realise that there are things in the Fediverse that outclass Msatodon.
I think you shouldn’t even use this place. None of these apps are contributing to you being a healthy, stable, happy human being.
Its just strangers voting and commenting without ever meeting eachother, and being incredibly brainwashed by the specific content that is allowed to be seen. People end up in perception bubbles here and everywhere on so called social media.
You should not use phone apps at all for spending time. But thats hard for most since we are tired, we don’t have any interests outside of work, we don’t know that many people in real life, and we are lazy.
Is this better than cable tv? Sure. But it’s no substitute for actually having something going on in your life that you feel passionate about and want to do all the time.
I disagree hard with this. As someone with too much going on, with a lotbof different people, but, not a lot of people or places to talk about things I find engaging or important to work through. Lemmy has been a great spot to communicate my thoughts. With people often really challenging me to understand and communicate why i’ve taken whatever position I’ve taken.
That’s true actually. People will tell you what they really think here. And if you use that to challange your views, then maybe you can learn from it.
I think this is true of lemmy, which is a reddit clone. But an IG clone, I think, could actually be quite healthy - it would just be a feed of pics that friends take. It’s a good way to stay connected to friends who might have moved away, or with people in your life when you’ve become very busy.
I just pointed them over to mastodon.social, pixelfed, and some others. Andvi dont tell them its fediverse, its just another site that anyone can spin up. They can dig if they want to. One out of 4 initially stay. Some come back.
What helps is friends and family on the platform.
There’s a bit of an issue with that. Re-Centralization. If the grand majority of users are in the “Main” or “Primary” instance, it’s just moving one mass from one to another, without spread… The original problem the fediverse had (around twitter acquisition) was discoverability, I am not sure how much of an issue that might be yet, but it would affect how people across the verse find new things. Lemmy is one of those that thankfully, “just works”, but the Friendica instance where I am seems to prioritize geographically local-first and barely anything else, unless specified… That could be a Friendica-specific issue though… Maybe Mastodon fairs better in this regard.
There’s also a small solution I can think of for this… Does the Fediverse have an equivalent to
matrix.to? Matrix.to (and instances of it) just redirects whatever client to whatever room on whatever homeserver. I personally think it’d be nice, if we have something similar, so that artists and vendors and similar, could, in theory, have a one-link to them, and have that also be a QR Code for them on their business cards too. – I do apologize if this sounds corporate, but from where I’m from, if you wanna catch up on events on follow a new artist you, typically they use QR Codes.https://redirect.piefed.social/ takes you to your nearest PieFed instance.
Two thoughts based on what you wrote:
There’s a bit of an issue with that. Re-Centralization. If the grand majority of users are in the “Main” or “Primary” instance, it’s just moving one mass from one to another, without spread…
I think it’s plenty fine to recommend a specific instance to people. It doesn’t need to be the main one either, it can even be yours:
Does the Fediverse have an equivalent to
matrix.to?Not really. Probably because Matrix can “get away with” recommending some default software (including web apps) to view a community from any server, regardless of where it is, mostly because there’s very few instances of that software to recommend. Matrix.to is a first-class service provided by the same people who run the flagship Element client and develop the server too, after all. And it’s still limited: matrix.to will not point you towards a niche instance of Element, for example.
But things get worse when it comes to Mastodon and Lemmy because usually instances tend to act as both data servers and clients. If somebody sends their profile link to a friend, it goes to their server. People have implemented sharing techniques, but these are janky at best, and require extra configuration and pre-knowledge on the part of the recipient.
And I still don’t know how to open a post from a different Lemmy instance on my current one without manually looking for the community and then the post.
yo what’s “threads” doing there
Wdym?
it’s from meta/facebook
I know that, but why do you mention it? Your post doesnt seem to be linked to another post
I take it you consider “threads” as a fediverse instance? It’s a corpo backed platform just like facebook and gives you free coffee instead of freedom
Ooh, I get you now! I am sorry if I made that impression, I did not mean to say that. I totally agree on your point. It should not be an real option to let them use threads. I agree on some people here, that its better than nothing, but its still meta.
send them links to good content they would be interested in?
OK, just dug up a list of most popular Reddit subs.
We actually have a lot of places for them already, but the viewership is low so the contributions are low.
look at /r/funny 43k weekly contributors vs our top of funny@sh.itjust.works with 15k subscribers. They throw away 3x more contributions every week than we could even if everyone posted something every week.
we can’t solve the posts without the people or we end up in bot hell. But we could probably curate the best stuff they’re posting and dupe it here.
We need more niche communities and for them to stay alive. I know when this all started, I tried to field a couple new communities and contribute to a niche gaming community. It was only the mod and me for a coupe months, then it was only me. Zero engagement, and if i posted a useful map or chart from IGN, they just downvoted me. That got old after a couple more months and I abandoned it.
If you look at the content in funny or mildly interesting, The content they’re posting over there from their large user base is truly engaging. I hate to see bots, but maybe we could come up with some tooling to make curation borrowing easier?
we could probably curate the best stuff they’re posting and dupe it here.
We need more niche communities and for them to stay alive. I know when this all started, I tried to field a couple new communities and contribute to a niche gaming community.
True. And also true.
I think these are the main two content related barriers for entry that Lemmy faces.
Content duping could be a good idea to build some history for communities here and keep engaging content available on the platform.
Same thing applies for niche communities, if people can’t find the things they’re looking for they’re more likely to leave.
One last thing, I think Lemmy needs better page indexing, maybe even as a site-wide rule to encourage this. Most people run into reddit through online searches or popular posts, no such thing exists for Lemmy.
handing it off to elasticsearch wouldn’t be hard, but it would probably be expensive.
it would also be per node :(
could maybe create a federated search engine, everything that federates with it gets indexed. OF course who-so-ever didn’t want to federate could not federate and make the whole thing icky
Whenever I suggest the fediverse to a non-tech friend, I point them to a piefed feed of low-politics low-tech communities:
Motivation will be the big challenge, for the technical aspect I like to recommend di.day for simple ‘switch recipes’ for many things tech
Thanks for this link, I didn’t know this existed. Going to spend some time to see if there’s something I can switch to easily.
Just say it’s a less toxic reddit clone then talk about how Reddit sucks. I’m 0% tech inclined and I’m here cause the Voyager App made it easy. All I had to know was Reddit sucks (and got perma banned oops 🟢) and installed the voyager app and the rest is history.
Also good to mention how there’s no ads and no corporate algorithms curating what you see to push their brainwashing.
The user base might be more toxic but the ownerships structure is def less toxic
This is half true. There are a few toxic instances and communities.
In the first half of the 2010s, Friendica appeared to have the solution for this problem.
People needed a Twitter account to keep up with what’s going on on Twitter. They needed a Facebook account to keep up with what’s going on on Facebook. They needed a Tumblr account to keep up with what’s going on on Tumblr.
And they had to log into these three websites separately.
In came Friendica with the goal to connect to anything that moved and then some.
You could run your Twitter account, your Facebook account and your Tumblr account through Friendica.
Perk #1: Three commercial, corporate, popular services, three accounts on commercial, corporate, popular services, but all on one website. With one login. All at once. Plus a better-than-Facebook Facebook alternative that was fully capable of long-form blogging on top.
Oh, and if you were interested in that diaspora* thing, Friendica had you covered there as well.
Even if you wanted to get into contact with folks on (pre-pump.io conversion) Identi.ca or elsewhere on StatusNet, again, Friendica had you covered.
Perk #2: You could use Facebook without actually using Facebook. You could interact with your Facebook friends, but you didn’t have to log onto facebook.com and let Zuck spy on you through that website in order to do that.
Perk #3: You could crosspost to everywhere all at once. You could send literally the same post to Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr. And diaspora*. And Identi.ca/StatusNet. Oh, and, of course, Friendica itself. And LiveJournal and a WordPress blog and Dreamwidth and Libertree.
Not by copy-pasting and sending the same text ten times. But by actually only sending that one message.
And you only had one comment tree under that message with comments from everywhere. Of course, Twitter users couldn’t see comments from Facebook etc. But you, you could see them all in one place.
However, and I know this from personal experience, this didn’t work. Either it was too technical, or people didn’t needed alternatives to stuff that just worked for them, or both.
Also, after a couple of years, Facebook no longer let third parties extract data. If you, as a Friendica admin, were caught doing just that with the old Facebook connector, then Facebook terminated not only the dev license you needed to run the Facebook connector on Friendica, but your entire Facebook account. (For a time reference, all this was before Mastodon was launched.)
Those were the days. I remember there existing some Qt app that did similar. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram (before Facebook acquired it) and AIM (via pidgin) all in one app. Then they killed the open standard
As for Pixelfed:
It’s like Instagram but you actually have agency over your content and you’re not at the whim of Meta’s corporate censorship.
