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.
OK, so I replied to a couple threads, but I’ll put my direct answer here. You have to frame it in terms of something they ALREADY care about, not try get them to care about decentralization.
I’m a non-technical Fedi user. I didn’t give a damn about decentralization or FOSS when I first joined. I only vaguely understood what those things even meant. (I do understand and care now, but that came later after I kept seeing people talk about them in Fedi spaces.)
I joined Lemmy because I cared about getting away from the big tech billionaires, basically. I’m sick of AI and don’t want to use Reddit as long as it’s partially owned by Sam Altman. I wasn’t thinking in terms of joining the Fediverse, I was thinking in terms of “Reddit alternative that doesn’t directly support Sam Altman/OpenAI.” The “choose an instance” thing was a barrier, but that faded after I found out I could change it later and decided to just default to the most popular instance for now.
Your non-technical friends probably don’t care about decentralization (yet), but they might care about:
-Fuck AI companies and the big tech billionaires
-Avoiding psychologically manipulative algorithms that make social media addiction more likely
-More human interactions, fewer ads and bots.
etc.
This part is harder, but you’d need to find communities on here they’d be interested in. I joined when I was thinking about deGoogling, and the thriving tech communities on here appealed to me for that reason even though I wasn’t a techie. This might be easier with a different part of the Fediverse, depending on the person’s interests. Lots of creative people of all stripes are on Mastodon, for instance.