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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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.
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.
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. :)
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?
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!
so for me it is not even about friends being on there
Have to disagree with you there. Those communities are made by people. Your friends certainly are some of them.
You could be that guy. Create the communities you want. Invite your friends. Be the change you want to see.
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
Yes, I agree 100%. I quit the major platforms and experience this as well. I’m pretty much survived by the relationships I made from those communities but I do still get left out of a lot of stuff because I refuse to capitulate to them.
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!
For the Instagram people, if they’re also using Threads, poke them to enable ActivityPub. Several medium/large instances defederate, but it’s an entry point for them.
Also, don’t be forceful and try not to pass a sense of superiority. Apply pressure when you see opportunities, such as if they complain of a platform, how a given alternative solves that, but know your boundaries. And all the while, be patient, for it could be a years-worth endeavor.
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
get them to sign up to whatever instance you’re on and dont even bother telling them there is other stuff out there until they’re settled in.
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 :)
You think you want this, but you don’t.
If your friends are largely into TikTok or Instagram, they’re not going to switch to the Fediverse.
Reddit and Twitter have viable fediverse equivalents. There are none for short-form video. Peertube is awash in low quality content and Pixelfed might prove an alternative if one is willing to spend six months building up 1000+ follows.
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.
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.
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!
People only get “less addicted” if they want to or if they are getting their dopamine from some healthier alternatives. If you meet your friends and they all prefer to scroll IG for 1h instead of talking with each other, you need to find more more interesting things to do together.
I think this is a missunderstanding. They are not on their phone for a whole hour. But they get their phone out every hour to watch reels for 2-3min.
If it’s really only 3 minutes in the hour, maybe it’s not so bad after all? If you are annoyed by the behavior, maybe just look for a way to nudge them out of it. Tell them that the first to reach for their phones has to pay the next round. You don’t get to be preachy about it, but it forces them to be conscious about the habit.
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.
Whenever I suggest the fediverse to a non-tech friend, I point them to a piefed feed of low-politics low-tech communities:
