Fediverse

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.

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.

Create a nice atmosphere.

Make it simple and remove any technical barriers. They should be able to google "Fediverse" click on the first link. Choose a username and be on their way. Find the app with the same name and install it in 2 minutes.

The network effect is a thing. They need to already find lots of their friends, interesting people and their favorite stars there.

And it has to be easy to discover them, if we don't have an "algorithm" that suggests content.

Lemmy (or at least lemmy.world) was bonkers levels of buggy last summer during the reddit blackout. Like, literally unusable levels of buggy. Getting the word out that it's (mostly) bug-free now would probably be good, because I'm sure there were many redditors who tried it and quickly swore it off as a pile of shit.

Otherwise I'm in agreement that the instance-selection part of sign-up is a huge barrier, because what instance you choose is actually really important but it's overwhelming when you're just getting started. Plus not being able to migrate your account/communities/posts to another instance if yours goes to shit/shuts down/turns out to not fit your needs makes the fediverse feel really unstable.

The Fediverse needs a hell of a lot of work before we can even consider mass adoption.

I guess this ties into marketing, but I think rebranding the “fediverse” as the “social web” would be a good start. It has a broad neutral tone that I think is easier for regular people to latch on to.

It’s way harder to find posts on mastodon compared to bluesky as you have to follow people to start getting a feed, whilst in bluesky they have a discovery feed. This makes it a way more streamlined experience for users, making bluesky and threads far more attractive to users than mastodon

We don't. Normies made Reddit suck and they'll make Lemmy suck too. Always have at least a small barrier to tech entry. When anyone can use it then everyone will use it. So do you want Facebook? Because that's how you end up with fucking Facebook.

Porn?

More people would be great, especially for niche communities.

I don't see #2 as that big of a problem. Do we want people who won't expend any effort to join? I guess everyone sees the line between accessible and "dumbed down" a little bit differently. I'm not saying #2 is great. I recognize it is an obstacle. But it's also kind of the point of Lemmy...in the sense that this is not a monolithic corporate one-size-fits-all kind of endeavor. In a way, the obstacle also serves as a teaching moment, if you will, of how this thing even works.

Item 4 seems a bit chicken-and-egg to me. But my guess is, not being able to find those communities isn't nearly as big of a problem as those communities not having any content / participants. I can see the argument that one causes the other, but I haven't found it very challenging to find those empty places. It's just not much fun to hang out there by yourself.

1. Stop calling it “the fediverse”

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 🤷🏼‍♀️

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.

With all due respect, fuck the normies. The fediverse is better off without them.

People have suggested making a portal/quiz for instance signups, but that adds to the barrier. There are also problems like how in-depth and inclusive it should be. It reminds me of Linux distro pickers that often suggest weird niche distros.

There are already big/default instances in the Fediverse though but there are people who actively discourage this. Maybe Mastodon just had a bad start and Bluesky learned from that. I wonder if Bluesky's PDS will be like Fediverse instances though. Many Fediverse instances are built around shared interests but the PDS just looks like a glorified handle.

Personally, I think the Fediverse discourse should shift to designing social media with decentralization in mind rather than mimicking mainstream social media with a "decentralized twist". I don't think the Fediverse will ever be as big as Twitter, but it doesn't have to be. It just needs to be sustainable enough to keep new conversations going.

Doesn't answer the question but maybe it's worth sharing anyway.

What made reddit so popular in my opinion was that every sub wasn't filled with agenda driven narratives you could find interests or memes random people with deep insights to whatever the topic was.

In Lemmy it seems every sub is skewed with left wing or DTS filled insane ppl and to find just normal shit is the rarity

Much like when there is an exodus on other platforms to host only right leaning viewpoints a "normal" person viewing it will see the same thing Lemmy has become and just go back to what they were using before

The problem is not the platform its the people. Chill tf out with all that propaganda horseshit and u might get regular ppl to use your product.

I have to say, as something if a social media virgin, I am puzzled by #4. I have never been a Facebook, Instagram or Twitter user. Previous to getting into the Fediverse, the only platform I engaged with that could be considered social media was Reddit, and I left that behind because of the whole brewhaha over third-party clients.

Since finding my way here, I have become an enthusiastic user of Mastodon, Pixelfed and Lemmy. I could not have imagined that it would be easier to acclimate myself and i have not encountered any barriers to entry, or at least I have not recognized any.

Is my experience atypical?

So I have been on Mastodon and Threads for quite awhile. I'm on BlueSky now too. Threads is the most enjoyable of the three by far. I don't see how marketing has to do with it in any way, but after spending some time on each, I prefer Threads. It's the only one that I've found content I wanted to engage with.

With Mastodon, I feel like I still can't get started. I'm not sure what to do.