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.
No dice.
It needs to be completely for dumb-dumbs. A phone app named “Fediverse” or something that’s even easier to set up than the official Mastodon app.
It needs even bigger dopamine kicks and even worse brainrot than Instagram and TikTok.
It needs influencers and other hyped-up online celebs with millions upon millions of followers and tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of likes every week.
The only other alternative would be the big corporate silos being shut down or blocked with no other corporate silos to take their place so that your friends can’t get their kicks from corporate silos anymore. Even if that amounted to cold turkey.
I don’t think naming it “Fediverse” would help much. The Fediverse is already a confusing concept for a lot of people, while “better version of Instagram called Pixelfed” is more straightforward. I think the best bet might be to improve the UX on the official Mastodon app, make an official Lemmy app named Lemmy, etc. Have “make an account” default to the largest instance, but have a “choose a different instance” option in smaller font as well, complete with a question mark button that gives people a VERY brief explanation of what an instance is, reassures them that they don’t need to worry about it right now, and mentions that they can change it later. This might be tricky on Lemmy in particular, as the flagship instance from the lead devs is controversial and no longer the most popular one, but might work better on other Fedi platforms.
I kind of agree with the rest of this though. The Fediverse simply lacks most of the celebs, interesting people, and dopamine-providing stuff that mainstream social media has. You’d probably need to do some kind of big PR campaign where celebs talk about moving to Fedi platforms (and have them, you know, actually be on here.) Make a big cultural movement where all the cool kids are moving to Mastodon. I’d like to hope you could bring in some excitement without the kinds of shitty, manipulative algorithms that the big platforms have. But it probably would help to make it somehow easier to find interesting/fun/engaging stuff. You might need a more Reddit-style setup where you select some interests and it points you to related communities or hashtags that are popular on your instance or something.
This is literally what the official Mastodon app does. Short name, long name, e-mail, password, server selection field that defaults to mastodon.social. Without the question mark and explaining to people what a server is.
This is why practically everyone who joins Mastodon is railroaded to mastodon.social. In addition to everyone being railroaded to Mastodon already without being told that there’s other stuff than Mastodon connected to Mastodon and posting into Mastodon, let alone that they could use that other stuff themselves.
This is why mastodon.social has 22% of the monthly active users in the whole Fediverse and about a third of Mastodon’s monthly active users.
The result is that many think that Mastodon is just a phone app. They don’t know what’s behind it. Once they learn about mastodon.social, they think that mastodon.social is the Mastodon website. Many Mastodon newbies take at least several months to even learn that Mastodon is decentralised and not another centralised single-website silo.
A lucky few take a few extra months to understand that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon. Many take years. A whole lot from either group can’t cope with those intruders into their precious fluffy Mastodon Fediverse, and they want their precious fluffy Mastodon-only Fediverse back. Like, they absolutely shat brix when they came across the first “toot” with over 500 characters, and now they’re trying hard to force the whole Fediverse to behave precisely like vanilla Mastodon.
I’ve seen Mastodon users duking it out with Akkoma/Calckey/Friendica/Hubzilla/etc. users often enough, believe me.
Many more, however, still believe to this day. that the Fediverse equals Mastodon. Or at most Mastodon with a few extras glued on. They believe that PeerTube is a YouTube-like Mastodon add-on for videos that are too long to upload them to Mastodon. But if it looks like it could have come from Mastodon, they think it did come from Mastodon.
But for the Fediverse as a whole, railroading everyone to Mastodon can’t be a solution.
Yes, Mastodon is for dumb-dumbs. It’s easy to get.
But, and this is something that people who only use Mastodon fail to understand, Mastodon is so lacking it hurts. It hurts the rest of the Fediverse.
There are so many cool features all over the Fediverse. Very useful features. But if Mastodon doesn’t have them, and if Mastodon doesn’t support them, then they simply don’t matter because the place where everyone goes doesn’t support them.
For example, the Fediverse has loads of places with discussion groups. The Threadiverse, Friendica and its descendants etc. Especially the latter is great for those who are looking for something like Facebook Groups. But Mastodon has no support for groups whatsoever. And so everyone is stuck with shouting into the void with hashtags and hoping someone somewhere out there will read it because that’s all you can do on Mastodon. And large parts of the rest of the Fediverse have to follow suit and sometimes use dirty hacks to “follow hashtags” like you can natively do on Mastodon.
As for celebrities, there are a few in the Fediverse. Of course, they’re all on Mastodon, and they’re too busy and not geeky enough to understand that there’s a Fediverse beyond Mastodon (and what seems to be glued onto Mastodon, if anything). But there are no AAA celebs of the kind that have hundreds of millions of Twitter followers.