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.
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.