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.
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!
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!