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.
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.
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.
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?
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…
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.