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.
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!