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.
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.
Yep
Its a good idea overall but i cant even explain what a fediverse is and what the advantages are to non tech people
They dont give two shits about data privacy like an EULA or privacy agreement
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.
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 love it So the answer is to create an algorithm for the fediverse?
It’s like with Linux, just get new friends.
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.
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