Fediverse

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.

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

For the Instagram people, if they're also using Threads, poke them to enable ActivityPub. Several medium/large instances defederate, but it's an entry point for them.

Also, don't be forceful and try not to pass a sense of superiority. Apply pressure when you see opportunities, such as if they complain of a platform, how a given alternative solves that, but know your boundaries. And all the while, be patient, for it could be a years-worth endeavor.

As for Pixelfed:

It's like Instagram but you actually have agency over your content and you're not at the whim of Meta's corporate censorship.

Whenever I suggest the fediverse to a non-tech friend, I point them to a piefed feed of low-politics low-tech communities:

• https://piefed.social/f/highsignal
• https://piefed.social/f/highmemecontent

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.)

Bro, after being here for quite a while. Most of the people here are nontechnical. They couldn't actually do much more tech then the average person. And the bitch like no where else.

Enjoy!

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.

OK, just dug up a list of most popular Reddit subs.

We actually have a lot of places for them already, but the viewership is low so the contributions are low.

look at /r/funny 43k weekly contributors vs our top of funny@sh.itjust.works with 15k subscribers. They throw away 3x more contributions every week than we could even if everyone posted something every week.

we can't solve the posts without the people or we end up in bot hell. But we could probably curate the best stuff they're posting and dupe it here.

We need more niche communities and for them to stay alive. I know when this all started, I tried to field a couple new communities and contribute to a niche gaming community. It was only the mod and me for a coupe months, then it was only me. Zero engagement, and if i posted a useful map or chart from IGN, they just downvoted me. That got old after a couple more months and I abandoned it.

If you look at the content in funny or mildly interesting, The content they're posting over there from their large user base is truly engaging. I hate to see bots, but maybe we could come up with some tooling to make curation borrowing easier?

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.

I’m a pretty active poster & reader over on Mastodon and think the Fediverse is neat. That said, people who share my interests (vintage signage, 1970s punk rock / new wave, old monster movies, etc.) pretty much only hang out on Instagram, and do all their image sharing and commenting over there. The more general “this is my lifestyle” people head where the action is, and it ain’t here.

Motivation will be the big challenge, for the technical aspect I like to recommend di.day for simple 'switch recipes' for many things tech

get them to sign up to whatever instance you're on and dont even bother telling them there is other stuff out there until they're settled in.

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.