We have a lot of options for all social media and other apps, but it is hard to catch people’s attention. How can we make more people use these platforms rather than a platform that p.dophiles run
(1) Network effects. People want to use social media that everyone else is using. Once a site achieves a critical mass of users it becomes the obvious choice to join. It also becomes difficult to leave because if you have built up a personal network on most sites, you can’t take it with you.
(2) Convenience. Most sites don’t require a lot of effort to use. In the past few years this one has surprised me a bit. The level of effort most people are willing to put in to trying a new site is basically 0. Using something like lemmy requires you to read a few paragraphs and make a decision about a home instance. That is too much effort for a lot of people.
Social media networks without attention based algorithms also aren’t quite as addictive.
Using something like lemmy requires you to read a few paragraphs and make a decision about a home instance.
Hell, it isn’t even a major decision since moving instances is so easy now. Yes, it impacts the initial experience, but every social media app starts with a default experience and usage refines it from there.
I think that it would be easier for them to give up social media completely than to move somewhere else without people.
The only way would be to have something there that they need or want and then tell them to make an account in a specific place, no choosing instances bullshit, they’ll figure it out eventually if they’re interested.
I was watching a livestream the other day by someone who appears intelligent and knowledgeable enough to know that she should probably give up Windows and use Linux instead. So far as I could tell there isn’t really any reason why she shouldn’t. It was the kind of stream where she had plenty of time to just talk freely about whatever was on her mind, and usually that’s nothing to do with computers or their operating systems. But she was thinking of doing it. She worries about this and that. She wonders if OBS will work as well, she imagines it would be a lot of work, she seems unsure that her tech skills would be good enough, she worries that it might go wrong, that it might not be worth it, that she might pick the wrong distro, that her webcam wouldn’t work, that it might be a colossal waste of time for very little benefit.
People unaccustomed to software freedom find it hard to understand how it would benefit them. People are afraid of change.
I saw a post about Upscrolled and commented that people should stop joining centralised social media because they all end up the same way, and I got a downvote. On Lemmy.
My friends were all excited about bluesky when that launched, and I told them to join the fediverse because bluesky was just Early Twitter. They didn’t listen, then bluesky welcomed ICE. Now they’re excited about upscrolled, and I told them to join the Fediverse, and they still aren’t listening.
All of which is to say, I have no fuckin idea my guy. People are weird.
The public LOVES easy options
UX sucks. Accessibility is nonexistent.
Depends on what you mean by accessibility.
You can browse and post on the fediverse from any text-only browser, which makes it easy to use screen reader software and navigate it without a mouse.I don’t think reddit even has an option for alttexts. Lemmy really encourages it.
People do not care about decentralization and privacy that is the harsh reality. The best way to promote privacy is to not talk about privacy and provide concrete advantages and unique feature.
Most people moved to Cara not pixelfed. Most people moved to upscrolled not loops.
Also the marketing is terrible. The fediverse creators should go to tech podcast, contact tech medias, participating to general tech events etc
Well, often they are just not as good and active. Most people care about content and service more than principles.
I’m on Lemmy due to principles but I am the kind of guy who will reject every single “legitimate interest” cookie consent, even if I have to click 300 times to do that… And even I went back to Reddit after my first encounter with Lemmy. The lack of content is a huge issue.
Decentralisation is an issue as well. Yes, it is here to solve problems, but it solves problems that big platforms face, but it creates a bunch of small problems that kill small platforms.
Most people don’t want to be forced to choose which one of the hundred providers they want to use, when they never heard about any of them, they have no idea what’s the difference and don’t care enough to learn… Shit, even I never cared to check what is the difference between Lemmy instances. And then you might have one community split between 10 instances… Each with one or two posts… And all long dead. Maybe one community with 10 times the user base could survive?
A lot of great comments, but another one that’s not mentioned: money and advertising
Open source / non profit run websites don’t have money to burn on mobile ads, and many wouldn’t want to put money into the ad industry even if they did.
It doesn’t guarantee users, plenty of startups fail after promotional campaigns, but it definitely helps people learn about the platform
This ☝️
but even more than ad, there is powerful marketing lock-in strategies: PCs come preinstalled with windows. Schools use and promote google stuff. Office is free and promted for university students, and same goes for Matlab and other scientific software
In addition to the points the other posts have made, I think we’ve been conditioned to believe that cost = quality, “you get what you pay for.”
So the Fediverse options are better because they ask for and rely upon donations - whereas all the large social network platforms are “free”?
People don’t pay for the mainstream st FF currently
Social media only matters if there’s people there. How can you convince someone of jumping ship to an empty place?
You’d think that would be a selling point these days
Everyone wants to be where everyone else is at.
Overall, the UX, but also in big part due to marketing.
Corporate/for-profit solutions tend to have enough money to pay not just for the development but the marketing of a product. Let me show you a non-social-media pair: Plex vs Jellyfin.
If you go to the individual websites, the difference is visibly stark. As a basic user with little to no understanding, which website sells the product better?
Open source most of the time can’t afford the long user experience studies and full on designer teams that make a product more likely to be chosen by the average person. Hell, open source often can’t even afford lawsuits (which is why a lot of projects go dark and disappear after accidentally stepping on the toes of someone revengeful or looking for a quick payout)… in fact most open source software is solely driven by unpaid contributors. And while there’s tradition in software engineering to contribute to open source, the same doesn’t really apply for designers.
And that brings us to UX, the most coveted topic of software engineering. Why? Because it’s not always intuitive what the users will find intuitive. After all we’re engineers, we care about the raw information, not its presentation. Sure a tidied up Excel spreadsheet looks nice, but it isn’t more functional in an overwhelming majority of the cases, than a no frills, just data spreadsheet.
That’s why most open source software feels so barebones. They’re full of features but those aren’t fancy, they’re not a nice experience for the users but simply fulfill a singular purpose.
And that to date differentiates Plex and Jellyfin, as well as any other pairing of paid-for vs open-and-free software.
Marketing budgets
Too busy being enslaved under this system of wage slavery
