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.
You must log in or register to comment.
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 :)
Now I figured out by systematic trying how to make sure that Facebook actually shows the post with images, and not only the link. I tried it with pixelfed. It worked 2 times when I pasted the link into a new post in the web app of Facebook, but it did not work when I posted the same link from the android app. Weird, but manageable.:) Example where it works: https://www.facebook.com/774580511/posts/10175467680010512/
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.
This only works for users in North America, though. Even though Meta had introduced this feature for EU appeasement purposes. (“See? We do support open standards!”)
If it still works in the first place, that is. And I’m not talking about loads of Fediverse servers blocking Threads and two Fediverse server applications even having the means to block Threads by user agent rather than URLs.
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.
What’s crazy to me is that the barrier to entry is lower on the fediverse in my experience
I try to use the browser, it forces me to their app; I try to make an account, but I have to change my IP address several times and wait out attempt limits; I finally get an account working, and then it gets restricted and they wanna see my ID
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.
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.)
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
People have strange and strong brand loyalty for proprietary things. It’s like a culture for them. I have seen it especially on iPhone and Whatsapp. Not only they refuse to use alternatives (Android; RCS/Signal/XMPP etc.). They will think you are a loser if you don’t use them. Or, even worse, will try to convince you to use them and that those are the best and anything else is a shit. I believe it’s the same for social media. So good luck!
We’ve already got this in the Fediverse.
Most Mastodon users are fully convinced that Mastodon is the best, and nothing in existence can beat it in any way possible. They defend their “Mastodon Fediverse” against “inferior, barbaric, culture-less intruders” like Akkoma or Sharkey or Friendica tooth and nail. They absolutely refuse to accept that something, anything in the Fediverse can be better than Mastodon at anything. Of course, when they get people into the Fediverse, they railroad them straight into Mastodon, and they intentionally say nothing about the rest of the Fediverse.
Only those who actually start daily-driving something else than Mastodon realise that there are things in the Fediverse that outclass Msatodon.
yo what’s “threads” doing there
Wdym?
it’s from meta/facebook
I know that, but why do you mention it? Your post doesnt seem to be linked to another post
I take it you consider “threads” as a fediverse instance? It’s a corpo backed platform just like facebook and gives you free coffee instead of freedom
Ooh, I get you now! I am sorry if I made that impression, I did not mean to say that. I totally agree on your point. It should not be an real option to let them use threads. I agree on some people here, that its better than nothing, but its still meta.
I think you shouldn’t even use this place. None of these apps are contributing to you being a healthy, stable, happy human being.
Its just strangers voting and commenting without ever meeting eachother, and being incredibly brainwashed by the specific content that is allowed to be seen. People end up in perception bubbles here and everywhere on so called social media.
You should not use phone apps at all for spending time. But thats hard for most since we are tired, we don’t have any interests outside of work, we don’t know that many people in real life, and we are lazy.
Is this better than cable tv? Sure. But it’s no substitute for actually having something going on in your life that you feel passionate about and want to do all the time.
I disagree hard with this. As someone with too much going on, with a lotbof different people, but, not a lot of people or places to talk about things I find engaging or important to work through. Lemmy has been a great spot to communicate my thoughts. With people often really challenging me to understand and communicate why i’ve taken whatever position I’ve taken.
I think this is true of lemmy, which is a reddit clone. But an IG clone, I think, could actually be quite healthy - it would just be a feed of pics that friends take. It’s a good way to stay connected to friends who might have moved away, or with people in your life when you’ve become very busy.