Does Fediverse even have what your friends want from a social media? Even the answer is yes, share that content with them and hope they will be intrigued. Unfortunately, the most likely is no in this case. Fediverse is only good for like five topics and everything else is “too niche”.

It would change if we had more people on here but the problem is, Fediverse just isn’t appealing to most people. They don’t care about decentralization and open-source. What they do care about though is algorithms and low barrier to entry - and neither need is fulfilled by the Fedi.

We are truly the Linux of social media haha.

Tell them to turn on fediverse sharing in the Threads account they already have.

I can already hear “No! Not like that!”. Fair enough, but that’s the thing most of your non-technical friends will actually do if you ask them. Be sure you have an account somewhere that can interact with it. Perhaps some will get interested enough to make accounts somewhere better.

My chosen, tender way to motivate non tech people to leave big Tech platforms for the fediverse is to post sth nice (nice pics, family info,…) on Friendica, Pixelfed or Lemmy, and then paste the link on Facebook, so that my Facebook friends see it, like what they see, get curious what’s that strange platform they had never heard of, register.

Problem 1: Sometimes FB shows the linked posts picture, sometimes it doesn’t. Problem 2: Some instances deactivate that content can be shown by external platforms like FB.

So far I did it three times; 1 (my friendica instance) didn’t show the pic though. So far, the success count is still on 0. But I still hope it will work :)

i’m a non-technical user and it is a pretty awkward position to be in tbh. i have been floating around various fediverse platforms for quite some years now and it is just very isolating. i can do all the right things in terms of curation and maybe find a tiny handful of cool people but i am still missing out on things like information about local community events, because a huge proportion of those pretty much only get posted on instagram.

so for me it is not even about friends being on there or needing to yap at brands but like…when is the popup art market on, oh there is a call for volunteers for beach cleanup, there is a blood drive on, the tattoo shop i like has a flash day coming up. and before someone yells at me: i dont currently have an instagram account and havent for a while now. but like…i do miss having access to that sort of information because it would get me out of the apartment and involved in local community events. and now i never know what is going on in my city and don’t go out as much. :/

so yay for not using evil meta bullshit that is increasingly janky and many kinds of fucked up. but like. if i had friends over on insta as well, it would make switching to a fedi platform a very hard sell: “come to this place where your friends are not, and probably no local information is available, and people will be continually pissy at you for not caring enough about technical things, and almost nobody wants to hear about the things you are interested in, and people dont want you there anyway because the low userbase is considered a feature not a bug”. ya know? it is just a non-starter.

there are good things about fedi platforms too, but some of those good things are things normal people will simply not understand or care about no matter how frustrated it makes technical users. i wouldnt tell a friend to come here, i would simply tell them to use what they are using less often. and i am sure there will be people in this very thread thinking “good, we dont want idiots like you here”, and that is indeed another part of why it is isolating for me to be here. :)

Hoooo boy. I’ve been asking this for ages. It’s INSANELY hard. I don’t think it’s possible actually. Normies gonna norm, and they’re gonna use “what everyone else uses”.

Until zucc climbs through their window to take a video of them performing a circus act for “age verification” in order to use their social media platform, people are never going to embrace the weird, scary, darkweb fediverse.

People only get “less addicted” if they want to or if they are getting their dopamine from some healthier alternatives. If you meet your friends and they all prefer to scroll IG for 1h instead of talking with each other, you need to find more more interesting things to do together.

In the first half of the 2010s, Friendica appeared to have the solution for this problem.

People needed a Twitter account to keep up with what’s going on on Twitter. They needed a Facebook account to keep up with what’s going on on Facebook. They needed a Tumblr account to keep up with what’s going on on Tumblr.

And they had to log into these three websites separately.

In came Friendica with the goal to connect to anything that moved and then some.

You could run your Twitter account, your Facebook account and your Tumblr account through Friendica.

Perk #1: Three commercial, corporate, popular services, three accounts on commercial, corporate, popular services, but all on one website. With one login. All at once. Plus a better-than-Facebook Facebook alternative that was fully capable of long-form blogging on top.

Oh, and if you were interested in that diaspora* thing, Friendica had you covered there as well.

Even if you wanted to get into contact with folks on (pre-pump.io conversion) Identi.ca or elsewhere on StatusNet, again, Friendica had you covered.

Perk #2: You could use Facebook without actually using Facebook. You could interact with your Facebook friends, but you didn’t have to log onto facebook.com and let Zuck spy on you through that website in order to do that.

Perk #3: You could crosspost to everywhere all at once. You could send literally the same post to Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr. And diaspora*. And Identi.ca/StatusNet. Oh, and, of course, Friendica itself. And LiveJournal and a WordPress blog and Dreamwidth and Libertree.

Not by copy-pasting and sending the same text ten times. But by actually only sending that one message.

And you only had one comment tree under that message with comments from everywhere. Of course, Twitter users couldn’t see comments from Facebook etc. But you, you could see them all in one place.

However, and I know this from personal experience, this didn’t work. Either it was too technical, or people didn’t needed alternatives to stuff that just worked for them, or both.

Also, after a couple of years, Facebook no longer let third parties extract data. If you, as a Friendica admin, were caught doing just that with the old Facebook connector, then Facebook terminated not only the dev license you needed to run the Facebook connector on Friendica, but your entire Facebook account. (For a time reference, all this was before Mastodon was launched.)

I just pointed them over to mastodon.social, pixelfed, and some others. Andvi dont tell them its fediverse, its just another site that anyone can spin up. They can dig if they want to. One out of 4 initially stay. Some come back.

What helps is friends and family on the platform.

1. No algorithm.
   They come in, look at all posts, upvote down vote still see 99% of the content they DGAF about and leave.
   * teach them to curate?
   * create tech to curate? Starter Packs? Meta Communities?
2. No niche communities
   We’ve got cats and dogs and mildly interesting and greentext, but the gaming subs are dead, the automotive and sports and will just about any other community a normie would want either don’t exist, are squatted on by someone who made them 3 years ago and left or they’re owned by one toxic crackpot mod
   * If you have any interests or hobbies, it’s a good time to start some communities, get a couple people to help content. Maybe borrow some stuff on reddit.

If the come here and they can’t find what they want, they’ll leave

The curation part may make this a fools errand. They want the doom scroll, unending entertainment on tap. This place isn’t like that, it’s 2003 in here and we want to read what’s new then GTFO and go do something else.

Follow all the steps in https://runyourown.social/ , whether you run your own instance or not. The fediverse is fundamentally a reimagination of our social links, so it’s the occasion to do things differently. Get your friends together in a room and create accounts for each other, browse together, show each other what you discover. Create a private community just for your group to exchange stuff in there that on. This is a social “job” and it needs people keeping it alive, that is you in the beginning before the whole fediverse can do it

Pulling out insta or tiktok or whatever is a purpose-built dark pattern. The algorithms, content, and user interface are designed to turn you into a mindless consumption machine because the more ads you scroll or affiliate items you purchase the more money they make. So I don’t think the answer is “can we transfer their addiction to the fediverse.”

The fediverse is not without friction and that should be acknowledged. There is not “put in your phone number, confirm text message, receive dopamine.” You need to make an account with a password, choose an instance, some apps may have things to auto subscribe to for you, but most of that is on you. So they would need to want to switch, hurdle the friction, know that there is less content, and far less of it is built to provide dopamine hits so you scroll to the next ad. And if that is the fediverse you envision to get people onto it, I don’t share that vision.

I get the feeling but you will need to build some patience here.

It’s really hard to move people from social media and they have to do it willingly otherwise we just create a ghost town here. What I do is try to share links when I see something someone might enjoy so they see there’s other social media and sometimes I got asked like: “what was this social media like a twitter alternative?” And then you explain because they are interested but even then, the majority of cases they won’t switch just because of that.

The only thing we can do is keep using it, keep improving it and when things get even worse than they are on monopoly land, we will be ready to take them :)

If your friends are largely into TikTok or Instagram, they’re not going to switch to the Fediverse.

Reddit and Twitter have viable fediverse equivalents. There are none for short-form video. Peertube is awash in low quality content and Pixelfed might prove an alternative if one is willing to spend six months building up 1000+ follows.

Treat the fediverse as a pre 2007ish internet and don’t expect them to be there just focus on making new friends and creating a good space. If successful they might come but don’t put yourself in a position where you require it to use the fediverse.

If anyone knew, you wouldn’t have to ask. Everyone’d already been here.