Maybe don’t explain the Fediverse. If they dislike AI, just say you use a Reddit alternative that isn’t partially owned by Sam Altman. If they’re concerned about being addicted to Instagram, say you use an Instagram alternative without the addictive algorithms.
Yeah, Lemmy/Fediverse has a very specific brand of niche and very few others. I’m missing those book/media-related communities here too. Fedi needs more niches.
I hope not. Surely we can come up with other ways to help people easily find stuff they like.
Yeah, this is smart. If we get more thriving communities for different interests groups, more people will want to come and stay in the Fediverse. And that naturally lends itself to getting your friends to join, too, because some of them probably share those interests.
I don’t think naming it “Fediverse” would help much. The Fediverse is already a confusing concept for a lot of people, while “better version of Instagram called Pixelfed” is more straightforward. I think the best bet might be to improve the UX on the official Mastodon app, make an official Lemmy app named Lemmy, etc. Have “make an account” default to the largest instance, but have a “choose a different instance” option in smaller font as well, complete with a question mark button that gives people a VERY brief explanation of what an instance is, reassures them that they don’t need to worry about it right now, and mentions that they can change it later. This might be tricky on Lemmy in particular, as the flagship instance from the lead devs is controversial and no longer the most popular one, but might work better on other Fedi platforms.
I kind of agree with the rest of this though. The Fediverse simply lacks most of the celebs, interesting people, and dopamine-providing stuff that mainstream social media has. You’d probably need to do some kind of big PR campaign where celebs talk about moving to Fedi platforms (and have them, you know, actually be on here.) Make a big cultural movement where all the cool kids are moving to Mastodon. I’d like to hope you could bring in some excitement without the kinds of shitty, manipulative algorithms that the big platforms have. But it probably would help to make it somehow easier to find interesting/fun/engaging stuff. You might need a more Reddit-style setup where you select some interests and it points you to related communities or hashtags that are popular on your instance or something.
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?
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, I keep having to remind myself of that. Healthier tech is less convenient and not automatically tailored to our interests/desires by design. More convenience and automatic personalization means more psychological manipulation (at best, into spending more time on the platform so you will see more ads), as well as more data collection and less privacy.
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.