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.
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 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.
Whenever I suggest the fediverse to a non-tech friend, I point them to a piefed feed of low-politics low-tech communities:
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
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?
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
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.
The user base might be more toxic but the ownerships structure is def less toxic
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.
- 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.
Treat the fediverse as a pre 2007ish internet and don’t expect them to be there just focus on making new friends and creating a good space. If successful they might come but don’t put yourself in a position where you require it to use the fediverse.
In a way, maybe it’s better like this. I miss the old internet, and the fediverse is the closest thing we have.
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.
Pulling out insta or tiktok or whatever is a purpose-built dark pattern. The algorithms, content, and user interface are designed to turn you into a mindless consumption machine because the more ads you scroll or affiliate items you purchase the more money they make. So I don’t think the answer is “can we transfer their addiction to the fediverse.”
The fediverse is not without friction and that should be acknowledged. There is not “put in your phone number, confirm text message, receive dopamine.” You need to make an account with a password, choose an instance, some apps may have things to auto subscribe to for you, but most of that is on you. So they would need to want to switch, hurdle the friction, know that there is less content, and far less of it is built to provide dopamine hits so you scroll to the next ad. And if that is the fediverse you envision to get people onto it, I don’t share that vision.
Its not possible for them to not use Instagram for at least 1h when we meet up.
I don’t use Instagram, so what does using Instagram mean?
Do they browse Instagram, liking and commenting on things? It’s difficult to leave Instagram if the things they want to see don’t exist elsewhere.
Do they take pictures and share them with friends? Because that’s easier to move if the content moves.
No, they just scroll reels endlessly. Like TikTok. It’s a plague, short videos are addictive.
