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.
Those were the days. I remember there existing some Qt app that did similar. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram (before Facebook acquired it) and AIM (via pidgin) all in one app. Then they killed the open standard
They didn't even have a common open standard.
These four had different client APIs. At least AIM's client API had to be reverse-engineered; same for MSN, Y!M and ICQ. At least some of these four declared using an unofficial client a criminal offence. Facebook required not only an account, but an account with special developer creds of sorts to be able to access the client API, and in the mid-2010s, they disallowed third parties to extract content from Facebook entirely.
The only "common" thing was the Twitter client API. This may have been open for a while until Twitter started forcing people onto the official app by doing what MSN, AIM, Y!M and ICQ had been doing for years already and changing their API every once in a while. Before then, Identi.ca/StatusNet used the Twitter client API, too, so that the same app could be used for Twitter and StatusNet, provided a server could be chosen in the app.
However, the latter was tricky. Most Twitter apps were hard-coded only for Twitter, also because their devs had never even heard of Identi.ca. Most of the rest were hard-coded to Twitter and Identi.ca because their devs had never heard of StatusNet, and they thought that Identi.ca was another isolated monolithic silo. (To be fair, when Identi.ca was still based on StatusNet, it was about 90% of StatusNet.) There were only a tiny handful of apps where you could enter a StatusNet server yourself.