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.
The harsh truth: most people don’t care about decentralisation, protocols or who owns the server. They care whether their friends, memes and creators are there. Don’t sell them the Fediverse as digital vegetables.
Find them a great app, help them follow 20 interesting accounts, and make it fun. Network effects beat ideology every time.
I’d start with Loops.video: TikTok already proved that vertical short videos are basically social media crack, so don’t ask your friends to suddenly become Mastodon power users reading federation essays.
Give them a familiar format without the TikTok ecosystem: Fediverse adoption probably needs to feel boringly familiar before anyone cares that it’s decentralised.
That reminds me that I really must finally mention this on: Fedizen.EU