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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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!
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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.
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.Yeah, and that’s really the crux of it. To 90% of people, the content is all that matters. That’s why comments like: “hey, you like TikTok? Why don’t you try Loops instead?” or “Check out Pixelfed, it’s a bit like Instagram!” are unlikely to work. For most people, it’s just a strictly worse version. The same thing but without the content. Why would they downgrade for no reason?
You have to care about something external to the core experience of consuming content to actually be here. That’s why our population at the moment is, well, just us here
*gestures around.*You have to care about FOSS, or decentralisation, or anti-corporatism, or really value the more human interactions you get in a smaller setting with fewer bots, or actually enjoy putting in more work and get less served to you by an algorithm.Most of the people with those values I believe will eventually trickle over here naturally. The rest though, this is a really hard sell for.
I mean I constantly enjoy being as algorithm free as possible and paying far less than any of my friends for better services and no/less ads. I enjoy curating my experience instead of zucc selling me trash I don’t need. I think most humans like being fed slop though, so be it.
What I want is a way to read content from the different places and then share stuff here.
What’s stopping you?
Automatically, I mean. Is there an app that lets me read reddit stuff and post to the equivalent fediverse communities?
There is a firefox extension and a linux app for this
Help a brother out… Wnat is the name?
There’s a bot that crossposts reddit posts here, I forgot it’s name because I blocked it. I’ll check my blocked list and post it here, brb.
edit: it’s this bot: @bot@lemmit.online
Oh, not the same. I’m talking about an app that would work like a feed reader + share button. Remember Google Buzz? Something like it.
Ah I see. I don’t think so, unfortunately. Something like that would definitely be useful, I guess as a browser extension? I wonder if something like that exists…
This is exactly why corporations/governments want to keep them tired and not caring. That’s how they get them to stay on large social media platforms where they can send millions of bots to shift the vote their way through propaganda, and it never ends, never gets better. It’s a dream for an authoritarian who thinks everything big brother did in 1984 was the best idea ever.
And to your point, the people keep having those problems because they are giving every shred of their money and data to massive corporations without a minuscule thought of how it affects other people. It’s a downward spiral from there.
Location being constantly tracked because you use google services turns into tracking where you shop turns into tracking your buying habits turns into…hey, we can charge this fool even more for the product they’re buying, and they’ll keep buying it! Even better we can create 56 fake brands all within a few cents differing price of each other so no one knows what product is actually good, and make millions of bot reviews so those aren’t reliable either!
All because people can’t be bothered to just think about who they are giving their data to.
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)
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.
the Linux of social media
😂 I love it So the answer is to create an algorithm for the fediverse?
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’d say so, yeah. Either implement algorithms and deal with the consequences or design something that would make discovery of new content as easy as seeing it appear in your algorithmic feed, while avoiding all the problems that personalization brings.
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.
It’s like with Linux, just get new friends.
I hope not. Surely we can come up with other ways to help people easily find stuff they like.
What’s crazy to me is that the barrier to entry is lower on the fediverse in my experience
I try to use the browser, it forces me to their app; I try to make an account, but I have to change my IP address several times and wait out attempt limits; I finally get an account working, and then it gets restricted and they wanna see my ID
Same. I had my new Bsky account suspended for using a VPN during the registration. I sent an email to their tech support explaining the situation. No response, account was never recovered.
I guess I’m not welcome on their platform lol.
What’s crazy to me is that the barrier to entry is lower on the fediverse in my experience
Note the word “entry.” The likelihood that someone doesn’t already have an account on Twt/Insta/FB/etc. and is making an account on the Fediverse has got to be near zeroo. No one is ever gonna hear about the Fediverse first before other major social media platforms unless they’re a literal child who is getting their first ever account.
So yes, while making a second acc on social media platforms is a major pain-in-the-ass, most people already have their account + app and don’t have to deal with that shit.
Oh yeah that’s a good point! I tend not to interact with people who use mainstream social media so I forget how uncommon it is to not have those accounts already
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.
So true! For example, on Reddit, there are way more active subreddits, discussions, and memes about anime, manga, and manhwa, but here it’s literally dead. And one reason people don’t shift toward this is also that it’s not something easy to understand and is way more work than just going to reddit.com and signing up. Whereas for the Fediverse, you’ve got to find a proper instance first, then make an account, wait for approval for some instances, etc… Way more work for people who’re used to just signup in secs using login ! The first thing should be a way to fix this and make logging in easier, and also there should be a particular popular app—like a main app—so that people don’t need to go search for apps.
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
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Maybe don’t explain the Fediverse. If they dislike AI, just say you use a Reddit alternative that isn’t partially owned by Sam Altman. If they’re concerned about being addicted to Instagram, say you use an Instagram alternative without the addictive algorithms.
Its a good idea overall but i cant even explain what a fediverse is
Don’t even try to explain what the fediverse is. At best, note it’s something like “the old forums from the 90s” or “some communities that affiliate with each other”. They can get the broader understanding by experience and experimentation later, if they dare, and it’s going to be a far more intuitive understanding than if we try to essay upon them.
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 guess so. But you will see more extremists for proprietary to free software. And it’s federated like email. So, for example, even if you have see a Proton extremist, it’s not a big deal, you can use another provider and still talk to him. Same for Fediverse.
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.
This only works for users in North America, though. Even though Meta had introduced this feature for EU appeasement purposes. (“See? We do support open standards!”)
If it still works in the first place, that is. And I’m not talking about loads of Fediverse servers blocking Threads and two Fediverse server applications even having the means to block Threads by user agent rather than URLs.
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!
Yeah, I’m also a not-very-technical user and I feel this. Fedi is great if I have a tech question or very general human question, but I miss seeing thriving online communities around some of my interests. The people organizing cool offline activities I want to participate in simply aren’t on here. My family’s not here, either. All of those are pretty important “social” aspects of social media that the Fediverse lacks.
I’m kinda baffled at the low-userbase-is-a-feature people. If decentralization and FOSS are so inherently wonderful and this kind of social media is so much healthier, wouldn’t you want all your friends and family to benefit from that? Don’t you want society as a whole to leave toxic algorithms behind and stop consolidating tech power in creepy dudes’ hands?
OK, so I replied to a couple threads, but I’ll put my direct answer here. You have to frame it in terms of something they ALREADY care about, not try get them to care about decentralization.
I’m a non-technical Fedi user. I didn’t give a damn about decentralization or FOSS when I first joined. I only vaguely understood what those things even meant. (I do understand and care now, but that came later after I kept seeing people talk about them in Fedi spaces.)
I joined Lemmy because I cared about getting away from the big tech billionaires, basically. I’m sick of AI and don’t want to use Reddit as long as it’s partially owned by Sam Altman. I wasn’t thinking in terms of joining the Fediverse, I was thinking in terms of “Reddit alternative that doesn’t directly support Sam Altman/OpenAI.” The “choose an instance” thing was a barrier, but that faded after I found out I could change it later and decided to just default to the most popular instance for now.
Your non-technical friends probably don’t care about decentralization (yet), but they might care about:
-Fuck AI companies and the big tech billionaires
-Avoiding psychologically manipulative algorithms that make social media addiction more likely
-More human interactions, fewer ads and bots.
etc.
This part is harder, but you’d need to find communities on here they’d be interested in. I joined when I was thinking about deGoogling, and the thriving tech communities on here appealed to me for that reason even though I wasn’t a techie. This might be easier with a different part of the Fediverse, depending on the person’s interests. Lots of creative people of all stripes are on Mastodon, for instance.
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.
- No algorithm.
They come in, look at all posts, upvote down vote still see 99% of the content they DGAF about and leave.
* teach them to curate?
* create tech to curate? Starter Packs? Meta Communities? - No niche communities
We’ve got cats and dogs and mildly interesting and greentext, but the gaming subs are dead, the automotive and sports and will just about any other community a normie would want either don’t exist, are squatted on by someone who made them 3 years ago and left or they’re owned by one toxic crackpot mod
* If you have any interests or hobbies, it’s a good time to start some communities, get a couple people to help content. Maybe borrow some stuff on reddit.
If the come here and they can’t find what they want, they’ll leave
The curation part may make this a fools errand. They want the doom scroll, unending entertainment on tap. This place isn’t like that, it’s 2003 in here and we want to read what’s new then GTFO and go do something else.
There’s also a lot of negativity.
There’s a Nintendo community. Obviously people on Lemmy really hate Nintendo, so any meaningful comment is overtaken by negative comments and useless discussion.
It’s a more extreme example, but I find the same true for Lemmy as a whole. Sometimes it feels like no fun is allowed.
miserable folks want everyone else to be as miserable or more miserable than them. they can’t abide anyone enjoying anything.
It’s so funny, I bought a Switch 2 recently, and the amount of vitriolic HATE i get for mentioning that I love and it’s great is insane.
apparently unless I build my own PC from dumpster parts and run a hyper specific distro and only run steam linux games, I’m some sort of traitor and horrible ignorant fool. There can’t ever be a legit reason to like just want to play fun games w/o being an insufferable superiority twat about it. and anything less than that is ‘boot licking’ or me being a nazi lover or something.
Everything on here has to be politicized to an absurd extreme, because no fun and happiness is allowed as long as the State of Israel exists, or something.
Yeah, that’ll get less if we get more people, but getting more people requires getting that less :)
We’re harsh of ‘fanboys’ ‘bootlickers’ a lot of people who just see themselves as enthusiasts for a given corporate vector.
Some people love Nintendo for the games and nostalgia and don’t place much stock in their litigious history.
We’re geeks and often gatekeepers.
Thanks for the reminder to engage in my hobby communities
- No algorithm.
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.
This is half true. There are a few toxic instances and communities.
yeah, and it’s easy enough to block them with the right front end and have most of your expereince here be less full of insane brainrot.
There are some really cool folks and communities that actually have really cool and positive posts. But it is hard to find with all the slop and ragebait that many folks, and new users, seem to propagate.
The user base might be more toxic but the ownerships structure is def less toxic
Same exact scenario for me. Voyager app makes it easy, only downside is content moves slower here then Reddit and not as many channels.
I get the feeling but you will need to build some patience here.
It’s really hard to move people from social media and they have to do it willingly otherwise we just create a ghost town here. What I do is try to share links when I see something someone might enjoy so they see there’s other social media and sometimes I got asked like: “what was this social media like a twitter alternative?” And then you explain because they are interested but even then, the majority of cases they won’t switch just because of that.
The only thing we can do is keep using it, keep improving it and when things get even worse than they are on monopoly land, we will be ready to take them :)
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 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.
Pixelfed is an Instagram clone. You can even import entire Instagram accounts worth of images and image posts into a Pixelfed account.
However, Pixelfed’s culture is not derived from Instagram’s culture. It’s literally Mastodon’s culture. The most common migration path into Pixelfed isn’t Instagram > Pixelfed, it’s Twitter > Mastodon > “I’mma try out this photo-posting add-on for Mastodon” > Pixelfed.
It’d be interesting to see what’d happen if there really was a mass exodus from Instagram to Pixelfed at such a scale that the Mastodon hardliners on Pixelfed are overrun. Also considering Pixelfed has exactly one developer who also has to handle Loops, Fedilab and the FediDB as one-man shows.
Don’t sell them on the fediverse. Sell them on a particular instance. It’s a LOT less intimidating and they’ll still be interacting with fediverse content.
While they are mainly using instagram because of the memes, what platform should I start with? Lemmy is a great start for memes I believe, but a bit ugly for people not familiar using (old)reddit. Loops is not that organised yet and flooded with peoples personal videos of random things, maby mastodon? (I know you were referring to instances but I think this is also important to think about first)
Maybe try them with Pixelfed, it’s a lot similar to instagram. while loops is similar to tiktok, might be something worth looking at.
Apps like summit and Jerboa are nice and smooth. It depends on the frontend entirely
True it depends on the frontend. summit is smooth, foss, lightweight adfree what more can a person need…
No dice.
It needs to be completely for dumb-dumbs. A phone app named “Fediverse” or something that’s even easier to set up than the official Mastodon app.
It needs even bigger dopamine kicks and even worse brainrot than Instagram and TikTok.
It needs influencers and other hyped-up online celebs with millions upon millions of followers and tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of likes every week.
The only other alternative would be the big corporate silos being shut down or blocked with no other corporate silos to take their place so that your friends can’t get their kicks from corporate silos anymore. Even if that amounted to cold turkey.
I don’t think naming it “Fediverse” would help much. The Fediverse is already a confusing concept for a lot of people, while “better version of Instagram called Pixelfed” is more straightforward. I think the best bet might be to improve the UX on the official Mastodon app, make an official Lemmy app named Lemmy, etc. Have “make an account” default to the largest instance, but have a “choose a different instance” option in smaller font as well, complete with a question mark button that gives people a VERY brief explanation of what an instance is, reassures them that they don’t need to worry about it right now, and mentions that they can change it later. This might be tricky on Lemmy in particular, as the flagship instance from the lead devs is controversial and no longer the most popular one, but might work better on other Fedi platforms.
I kind of agree with the rest of this though. The Fediverse simply lacks most of the celebs, interesting people, and dopamine-providing stuff that mainstream social media has. You’d probably need to do some kind of big PR campaign where celebs talk about moving to Fedi platforms (and have them, you know, actually be on here.) Make a big cultural movement where all the cool kids are moving to Mastodon. I’d like to hope you could bring in some excitement without the kinds of shitty, manipulative algorithms that the big platforms have. But it probably would help to make it somehow easier to find interesting/fun/engaging stuff. You might need a more Reddit-style setup where you select some interests and it points you to related communities or hashtags that are popular on your instance or something.
I think the best bet might be to improve the UX on the official Mastodon app, make an official Lemmy app named Lemmy, etc. Have “make an account” default to the largest instance, but have a “choose a different instance” option in smaller font as well,
This is literally what the official Mastodon app does. Short name, long name, e-mail, password, server selection field that defaults to mastodon.social. Without the question mark and explaining to people what a server is.
This is why practically everyone who joins Mastodon is railroaded to mastodon.social. In addition to everyone being railroaded to Mastodon already without being told that there’s other stuff than Mastodon connected to Mastodon and posting into Mastodon, let alone that they could use that other stuff themselves.
This is why mastodon.social has 22% of the monthly active users in the whole Fediverse and about a third of Mastodon’s monthly active users.
The result is that many think that Mastodon is just a phone app. They don’t know what’s behind it. Once they learn about mastodon.social, they think that mastodon.social is the Mastodon website. Many Mastodon newbies take at least several months to even learn that Mastodon is decentralised and not another centralised single-website silo.
A lucky few take a few extra months to understand that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon. Many take years. A whole lot from either group can’t cope with those intruders into their precious fluffy Mastodon Fediverse, and they want their precious fluffy Mastodon-only Fediverse back. Like, they absolutely shat brix when they came across the first “toot” with over 500 characters, and now they’re trying hard to force the whole Fediverse to behave precisely like vanilla Mastodon.
I’ve seen Mastodon users duking it out with Akkoma/Calckey/Friendica/Hubzilla/etc. users often enough, believe me.
Many more, however, still believe to this day. that the Fediverse equals Mastodon. Or at most Mastodon with a few extras glued on. They believe that PeerTube is a YouTube-like Mastodon add-on for videos that are too long to upload them to Mastodon. But if it looks like it could have come from Mastodon, they think it did come from Mastodon.
But for the Fediverse as a whole, railroading everyone to Mastodon can’t be a solution.
Yes, Mastodon is for dumb-dumbs. It’s easy to get.
But, and this is something that people who only use Mastodon fail to understand, Mastodon is so lacking it hurts. It hurts the rest of the Fediverse.
There are so many cool features all over the Fediverse. Very useful features. But if Mastodon doesn’t have them, and if Mastodon doesn’t support them, then they simply don’t matter because the place where everyone goes doesn’t support them.
For example, the Fediverse has loads of places with discussion groups. The Threadiverse, Friendica and its descendants etc. Especially the latter is great for those who are looking for something like Facebook Groups. But Mastodon has no support for groups whatsoever. And so everyone is stuck with shouting into the void with hashtags and hoping someone somewhere out there will read it because that’s all you can do on Mastodon. And large parts of the rest of the Fediverse have to follow suit and sometimes use dirty hacks to “follow hashtags” like you can natively do on Mastodon.
As for celebrities, there are a few in the Fediverse. Of course, they’re all on Mastodon, and they’re too busy and not geeky enough to understand that there’s a Fediverse beyond Mastodon (and what seems to be glued onto Mastodon, if anything). But there are no AAA celebs of the kind that have hundreds of millions of Twitter followers.
I think the broader idea is how to grow the Fediverse.
My suggestion is not your close friends, but instead what is your hobby? What is your interest? Because an interest group could build a social-network in the fediverse to keep hobbyists in contact and give them a place to share content they enjoy.
I don’t see the Fediverse as dethroning the general generic networks that big social media networks make, that are all about engagement. Instead the fediverse can become a space for multiple niche networks pulled together by shared interests instead. Not all of them may choose to federate but they would drive overall uptake of the technology and platforms. From there other parts of the fediverse can grow.
Yeah, this is smart. If we get more thriving communities for different interests groups, more people will want to come and stay in the Fediverse. And that naturally lends itself to getting your friends to join, too, because some of them probably share those interests.
