This is a follow-up from my previous thread.
The thread discussed the question of why people tend to choose proprietary microblogging platfroms (i.e. Bluesky or Threads) over the free and open source microblogging platform, Mastodon.
The reasons, summarised by @noodlejetski@lemm.ee are:
- marketing
- not having to pick the instance when registering
- people who have experienced Mastodon’s hermetic culture discouraging others from joining
- algorithms helping discover people and content to follow
- marketing
and I’m saying that as a firm Mastodon user and believer.
Now that we know why people move to proprietary microblogging platforms, we can also produce methods to counter this.
How do we get “normies” to adopt the Fediverse?
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Stop addressing them as “normies” would be a great start.
Can’t speak for rest of the Fediverse as I’m not super active on microblogging anymore, but at least here on Lemmy, there is such a strong “in” culture and quirky skewed perception of the world, and often times come off as actively hostile against those that do not share the same quirky skewed world view. The anti-AI, anti-corporate, would rather shoot myself in the foot if it’s not FOSS, etc kind of views, with their own strong vocal proponents, comes off as unwelcoming. People are addicted to socials because of the positivity they can get, not the negative sentiments that’s often echo’ed.
Amongst those that doesn’t share the kind of view, you’d already be looking at an extreme small minority that might be willing to give the platform a try, but as long as the skewed perception of the world dominates the discussions, you can expect them to go back to main stream centralized platforms where they can get more main stream view points based discussions.
Thats the neat part, you don’t. Social medias value isn’t determined by it’s tech. Its value is determined by who and what you can interact with. For example, people wont leave Facebook because everyone they know is on facebook because people won’t leave Facebook. Twitter is literally run by a nazi at this point and still it’s the same story where Mastodon and Bluesky aren’t even close. Same thing for reddit and lemmy. Lemmy simply doesn’t have the content reddit does, look no further than sports subreddits where any given game has a live game thread with a hundred or more unique commentors.
If you want mode people to come here you’re going to need to do two things. One you need to post content people want to see, and two you need to get very very lucky because as it stands if you don’t care enough about decentralization to lose out of a lot of content, theres literally no reason to be here. Its a long slow road and you’re still going to need reddit to do something stupid before we see another growth spike.
if you don’t care enough about decentralization to lose out of a lot of content, theres literally no reason to be here.
Officially supported clients which are not the Reddit app
This was one of the reasons I left, and I assumed most disliked the official app, but weren’t willing to part with the content.
Now, I think I was too close minded. Stuck in my bubble. If it’s not in a discussion about reddit sucking, chances are people don’t care that much.
App sucks? Didn’t think about that, it’s just an app. App really sucks? Whatever, they already use 5 other apps that are worse.
The medium shapes the experience, but isn’t an experience unto itself. Not that important to the average person.
Lots of content here feels like someone beta testing their manifesto the FBI will find
How do we get “normies” to adopt the Fediverse?
We don’t. Normies take one look at anything that isn’t mainstream and pinch their noses. A significant portion of them can barely make a search on the internet, they get lost at the idea of “websites” and are likely heavily biased against people who aren’t using what “everyone is using”
Anedoctal experience: back when I was using dating apps, I’ve had a fair share of girls that stopped talking to me once I said I didn’t have instagram, because it meant I was “hiding something”.
stopped talking to me once I said I didn’t have instagram, because it meant I was “hiding something”.
That’s awful.
Also, I guess they would think I’m hiding so much, considering the number of bloated awful services I’ve rejected.
That may be true for some people, but isn’t a valid generalization. See the Brazil blocking Twitter situation.
Millions decided to give Bluesky a chance and a graph showed daily user activity quadrupling. Now, a not-insignificant portion are saying they refuse to return to Twitter because:
- It feels less toxic and healthier
- They have more control over their experience
- They’re finally having fun with social media again
Sound familiar?
And I’m pretty sure Misskey has more features. Hell, Mastodon as well probably. Bluesky doesn’t even support video yet.
The first sin of the Fediverse isn’t being small, that’s the second. First is being a pain in the ass.
The migration that happened from xitter being blocked in Brazil is a good example of a bandwagon effect, or “people go where people are”. If xitter wasn’t taken down, neither bluesky nor threads would’ve received such a big and immediate influx.
Also worth noting is that the vast majority went for those 2, bluesky more so than threads, instead of any mastodon instance because those 2 are the mainstream alternatives
Yes, people chase content, which means chasing where many people are, but why did Bluesky become a mainstream alternative and Mastodon didn’t?
I’m saying marketing doesn’t cut it, and it’s not just about where most users are either, otherwise everyone but Threads would be irrelevant.
People bounce off both Threads and Mastodon, and there are platform-related reasons for that.
The number 1 pain in Mastodon is the dev team. I mean come on, there are plenty PRs to make mastodon better usable and they just get rejected.
Also we could have some sort of algorithm like we have here in lemmy (hot/scaled/new) but if you talk about it there you are instantly the devil. They WANT mastodon to be different, even if this hurt the userbase.
Discoverability is a huge barrier to entry in the Fediverse, and they’re not helping.
It’s hard for me to judge them too harshly, though. Fediverse devs do things I disagree with all the time, and users too. Maybe, in a different world, something else could’ve taken Mastodon’s place… but its forks stick close, Pleroma has the charm of a brick, Misskey is too 日本, and Misskey forks got Messy, and—
…Oh. That’s it, isn’t it? Mastodon is the best that ActivityPub has to offer most microblogging fans.
I’m surprised nobody has mentioned porn yet. Like it or not, it does drive growth.
That’s what I’m trying to do with https://xxxiver.se
I think porn creators would actually benefit enormously from using fediverse services. They own their data/platform, they can’t get kicked off, etc.
wow! that’s cool. Good job!
Yeah! I think that’s going to sway in this place’s favor very soon.
I predict a glorious age of the very best curated pornography being here.
As other preferred platforms enshitify, I expect a lot of innovate erotic sensual and/or dirty artists (new and established) to have a dynamic, accessible, profitable experience here.
It’s probably going to be very horny, but also really beautiful in a lot of pro-social ways.
God I hope so, but
Lemmythe Fediverse is weirdly anti-porn and anti-sex.Edit: the whole thing
Yeah. The litigation risk is considered high right now, and no one wants to be first to try it.
Which I totally get. This place is largely run by volunteers, after all.
We saw similar hesitation in the early days of WordPress/Wikipedia/Drupal proliferation. Eventually those solutions greatly enabled sites like BlogSpot and Tumblr to become wild places, and niche sites to pop up for stuff that BlogSpot and Tumblr didn’t want to touch.
I can think of a few specific anti-spam and security tools that strongly enabled casual admins of WordPress to start sites.
I think we will see an erotic golden age once Fediverse moderation tools cross some unknown usability threshold.
Edit: I come across here as really excited about porn. Lol.
Art has a long history of being erotic, and beauty appreciation is one of the better things technology can do.
I am also really excited for the rest of the content that will thrive after demand for porn has pushed the technology to maturity.
Yeah, porn is the only reason I still visit Reddit from time to every day.
Same. The volume of porn on reddit is staggering. On Lemmy most of the porn comes from repost bots with 0 quality filter or God awful AI bullshit.
there is lemmynsfw
I’m very well aware. I frequent that server.
cool
I’ll be open and honest knowing whenever bringing the subject up generates anger. “Normies” aren’t gonna join somewhere where 99% of the conversations revolve around using Linux. Jump into any thread and someone’s talking about it. Doesn’t even need to be a tech thread. As soon as someone goes against the grain immediate backlash. It’s not welcoming at all.
Weird.
Don’t.
I like what this is, I don’t want it to become everything for everyone
I don’t like that there’s so few people questioning the core concept of “one platform for everyone”.
Why does it have to appeal to everyone? Why can’t its audience be a subset of humanity who like nerdy shit? It’s what I liked about Reddit in the early years - it wasn’t completely inaccessible but it was niche enough that there was a bit of a filter, allowing me to find content and people that appealed to me.
Aiming for lowest common denominator doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.
Agreed. Look what Reddit turned into. Better to have fewer but higher quality comments than a sea of the same tired jokes and ancedotes over an over again.
Porn?
Since most people are talking about the sign-up barriers, I’ll mention culture and reputation.
I love Lemmy and Mastodon, but whenever I’ve seen the fediverse brought up elsewhere, someone inevitably shuts down any curiosity by suggesting that it’s a political echo-chamber. I don’t think that’s accurate for all of it, but if that reputation is out there, we probably need to make an effort to show that there’s a broader appeal. If the average person is expecting the fediverse to be the left-wing equivalent of something like “Truth Social”, I could understand the reluctance to adopt it.
someone inevitably shuts down any curiosity by suggesting that it’s a political echo-chamber
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I think
.mlacting as the official or at least de-facto “flagship” instance is doing more harm than good. I’ve seen the same arguments you mentioned, and it always seems to go back to either of the two.mlinstances or Hexbear. When political ideology is forced into every interaction, it always seemed it was coming from one of those three.I’ve shown people Lemmy World as an example that it’s not all political circlejerks, but I don’t know how many of them stuck with it.
Completely agree. I had no idea how bad this phenomenon was until very recently, when I fell foul of a virtual lynch mob and its political-commissar mod who behaved like a religious inquisitor even in private conversation. It’s real.
Nowadays, I point to show that it’s more than just politics, news and tech
Every social media has the same problem, reddit is on one side, twitter on the other, facebook is filtering by their own goals.
People here are just a bit different angle. But each instance is a little different, lemmy.world is more reddit like, lemmy.ml is leftist, hexbear is… something too, there are probably some right wing instances. Much more diverse than other networks and I enjoy seeing all those different point of views.
This is current problem in society that we don’t tolerate different opinion.
This is current problem in society that we don’t tolerate different opinion.
Exactly this. When online platforms become too homogeneous, any deviation from the typical opinions that are shared seems like a terrible, inexcusable offense that someone must do something about - thus, reinforcing the bubble.
We need to be able to disagree with each other and still get along.
Twitter was quite diverse actually (it might still be, I can’t say). You had the far left, far right, and everything in between on there but it worked somewhat because the algorithm kept people mostly in their bubbles unless they went seeking it out.
You don’t. If they don’t wanna be here, don’t take on this huge crusade to get them here. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. They must take the final step themselves.
Focus on making lemme a desirable place to be, less on getting people to use the communication tool you happen to prefer.
I think I’d be considered a “normie” maybe. I’m not super tech savvy (maybe a bit more than the average person though as I’m a bit of a photoshop wizard and am interested in tech subjects).
What brought me to lemmy was my moral compass. I’ve used reddit since the late 00’s so it was hard to let go but reddit just isn’t what it used to be. I could no longer use Joey, my reddit app of choice so I abandoned it because what they did to Joey and other apps was bullshit.
I still find myself on reddit every now and then when I need information on something specific though. I haven’t found communities on the fediverse that I connect with that are super active (things like houseplants, knitting, chronic pain, my specific city I live in, etc).
I use lemmy now for mindlessly scrolling before bed and news as I only use Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok for work so it’s not leisurely for me to get on normie social media. I do find some interesting articles and funny memes and that’s enough for now.
So maybe the key to get a more robust community is through pulling heart strings? Idk my husband still used reddit daily and I guess doesn’t give a shit about the lax morals of the company 🤷🏼♀️
I’m a developer, and it was a pain picking an instance. You start reading about them, and it turns out one’s censored, the other one’s communist, third one doesn’t cooperate with the other ones so you can’t see anything…
As long as it is like this, I don’t believe mass adoption is feasible. I would’ve given up because it takes a lot of time compared to just registering and off you go, but I was interested to see what’s all the ruckus after reddit started with censorship. Maybe interesting to mention that I was never an active reddit member (not one post there).
Indeed, nowadays I just send people to Lemm.ee
- neutral name (sorry SJW)
- second biggest instance
- almost no defederation
- no topic or country specific (I mean, technically Estonia, but everything happens in English, compared to feddit.org for instance)
almost no defederation
I don’t think this is really a good thing. Most people don’t want to bother curating their feed and if they get lots of bad stuff from instances that ought to be defederated, then they will leave.
-Neutral name (sorry SJW)
Boo this person! (I kid, don’t boo them, they’re doing good work and I understand if not everyone wants to be a sh.it.head)
Just send them to Lemmy world… Edge and shit lords will get banned and figure how this bitch works lol
Normies being on Lemmy world is better than. Reddit in my book
Just send them to Lemmy world
I agree that having a “default instance” would greatly help with onboarding new users, but as many others have said before, centralizing on the largest instance is not a good idea.
There are several other “general purpose” Lemmy instances. Why not send everyone to lemm.ee, until its size is close to lemmy world? At that point, start sending everyone to lemmy.sdf.org or lemmy.zip.
Great point!
I don’t know what other instances are viable bit we should have a place to get current preferred.
I just tell my peeps Lemmy.world it is like reddit with out going into details about fediverse since they ignore me once I start talking “federation”
The problem with this approach is that your peeps won’t see any reason to go there if it’s the same as the R-site only exponentially less popular.
There needs to be an understandable USP.
Perhaps: “But without ads. Ever. Anywhere.” Works for me and I know what an ad-blocker is, unlike a ton of normies.
Sincere question: what does “normie” exactly mean in the context of Lemmy? Is it a person that couldn’t get past setting up Lemmy account?
The term sounds like it has kinda elitist connotations. I mean I’ve set up Lemmy, but I don’t feel like I’m god given - maybe I should. 😆 (kidding, of course)
Yea, instead of a default instance, I think there should be a default system that assigns you to one of a set of participating “general” instances without you having to decide or think about it.
Doesn’t https://join-lemmy.org/ do that?
AFAICT, it helps you pick an instance based on your interests, which only barely helps with the problem. If you’re new to the ecosystem, you typically just want to join in and see what’s going on before making any decisions. And you probably don’t want to bother with selecting criteria for a selection guide at all.
What I’m suggesting is clicking a button “Sign Up”, enter credentials, verify and done. Then allow the whole finding an instance process pan out naturally.
Part of the issue IMO is that how an instance advertises itself isn’t necessarily how it will be seen by someone … they need to see it for themselves.
Part of the issue IMO is that how an instance advertises itself isn’t necessarily how it will be seen by someone … they need to see it for themselves.
Indeed
And then we will get more communities being created on Lemmy world, and then the whole Fediverse depends on one single instance. This seems like a good idea at first, but won’t stand the test of time.
I am trying to convince more instance admins to install Fediverser on their servers, so that we can have a way to point people to one site that can distribute the users and help with onboarding and discovery. But so far none of the admins really seem to be interested in the having to deal with the potential influx of users from Reddit.
I am trying to convince more instance admins to install Fediverser on their servers, so that we can have a way to point people to one site that can distribute the users and help with onboarding and discovery
What does Fediverser from an admin standpoint? Does it just enable a “Login with Reddit” option for onboarding new users?
That is the main thing, yes, but it would also allow for better coordination among the instances for migration efforts. “Fediversed” Instances can keep of redditors that migrated, can have more attributes to display for people when selecting a instance, can accept or reject a Redditor based on certain criteria (e.g, account is too new, or was flagged as a spammer, or is posting a language different from the main language in the server, etc)
Tell friends and family to get accounts on federated services you use. Word of mouth is how lots of websites get popular.
Recommend it when reddit comes up or gets mentioned.
I don’t even tell people I use Lemmy, let alone recommend it, because of how much authoritarian propaganda there is on here.
I love the idea and won’t give up on it easily, and I hope other users can join me in making it a better place by calling out propaganda.
because of how much authoritarian propaganda there is on here.
lol you never saw authoritarian propaganda in the commercial social media because you already are brainwashed.
I send people links to posts on Lemmy, and tell people I can’t see Instagram/Twitter/etc.
Is it working? No, not really, but it feels like it should.
Thank you for trying
You’re doing better than I am. I just bullshit them and say I’ll “probably check it out later.” By which I really mean whenever it gets reposted on a less shitty technology platform, in a few decades. But I don’t say that part.
Defeatist opinion.
The commercial alternatives hope to make money with every additional user. They use AB testing and statistics to streamline the on-boarding and to increase engagement. The result may not be in the user’s interest (doom-scrolling, ragebait, …) but it works.
For a fediverse instance, any additional user is a cost, not the promise of money. Financially, you wouldn’t want that. Those who fund instances are giving a gift to the world for their own reasons. You can accept the gift or not. Those who keep instances running with donations will usually want to sustain the community of which they are part. They probably don’t want it to change very much.
So, I don’t think matters will change. Partly because the psychological engineering is antithetical to the fediverse ethos (as I see it, in my humble opinion). But mostly because the outcome we see is an inherent result of the incentive structure.
Tell the people calling for nuking half the planet to stop it, enforce it.
Boom. You just eliminated 80% of the hostility on the platform.
A sweet interface like Sync for Lemmy and respectful content and engagement are the key to me.
