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.

You don't.

So will it always be a niche? Does the fediverse even try to get to the mainstream?

If anyone knew, you wouldn't have to ask. Everyone'd already been here.

I think, unless the big players are forced out of business (either by law or by a BIG societal shift) it has simply no chance to win over the mainstream. At least not worldwide... in the EU it might stand a bit of a chance but even that is more wishful thinking on my part.

My friends know the fediverse. But why should they switch, when they are addicted to the algorithm?

Don't sell them on the fediverse. Sell them on a particular instance. It's a LOT less intimidating and they'll still be interacting with fediverse content.

While they are mainly using instagram because of the memes, what platform should I start with? Lemmy is a great start for memes I believe, but a bit ugly for people not familiar using (old)reddit. Loops is not that organised yet and flooded with peoples personal videos of random things, maby mastodon?
(I know you were referring to instances but I think this is also important to think about first)

Do they want to make the switch? If they don't, they won't.

You can't force or convince the mainstream to get to the Fediverse when pretty much all of their connections are on the mainstream network.

That's why I think Lemmy/Piefed are the ones that have the biggest chance of sticking, because they're aimed to a public that's not necessarily mainstream.

I know they exist and I totally respect it, but I'm not even sure if it makes much of a sense an Instagram/TikTok alternative on the Fediverse, considering these social media are aimed around getting visibility either by personal relationship or by popularity (volume over quality). And I don't think that the Fediverse public as of now is looking to become that.

Keep it really simple. Don't talk about federation or how it works under the hood. Just say something like "hey I see you like Instagram - try Pixelfed I think you'll like it. It's in the app store".

Don't get them to try to find the perfect pixelfed instance, just use the default main one. They can move later if it clicks for them.

Maybe try them with Pixelfed, it's a lot similar to instagram.

They should switch BECAUSE they're addicted to the algorithm :D

Maybe start a discussion about how being addicted to Instagram isn't a great use of time and recommend Pixelfed as a less addictive alternative.

Does Fediverse even have what your friends want from a social media? Even the answer is yes, share that content with them and hope they will be intrigued. Unfortunately, the most likely is no in this case. Fediverse is only good for like five topics and everything else is "too niche".

It would change if we had more people on here but the problem is, Fediverse just isn't appealing to most people. They don't care about decentralization and open-source. What they do care about though is algorithms and low barrier to entry - and neither need is fulfilled by the Fedi.

We are truly the Linux of social media haha.

the Linux of social media

😂 I love it
So the answer is to create an algorithm for the fediverse?

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.

It also adds that most people who are "invested" in the Fediverse don't realize to what absurd degree the notion of caring about decentralization or open source doesn't matter to many people they try to get interested. For whom their problems are "We need more formula for the kid" or "Shit I gotta visit the family on the weekend and that's also the only days we could possibly work on getting that leaking pipe fixed, ever".

People have problems that need fixes. Their social media being a centralized one isn't a problem to them - it works right now. It's a solved problem. Trying to inject another problem to care about into their life will often actively aggravate people, and for understandable reasons: They got enough of them already.
Plus, in particular in current times, very serious very IRL issues. On multiple levels. Caring about Reddit vs Piefed or so is so far down the list, to most it feels ludicrous that this ought to be an issue to anybody at all.

Honestly, the lack of a decent algorithm is why I stopped using Mastodon. It's not a problem on lemmy since up- and downvotes are the algorithm, but for all other fediverse services it's what keeps me away.

The difference is that this doesn't mean I'm on Insta or Twitter, just that this here is basically all social-media I do.

i'm a non-technical user and it is a pretty awkward position to be in tbh. i have been floating around various fediverse platforms for quite some years now and it is just very isolating. i can do all the right things in terms of curation and maybe find a tiny handful of cool people but i am still missing out on things like information about local community events, because a huge proportion of those pretty much only get posted on instagram.

so for me it is not even about friends being on there or needing to yap at brands but like..when is the popup art market on, oh there is a call for volunteers for beach cleanup, there is a blood drive on, the tattoo shop i like has a flash day coming up. and before someone yells at me: i dont currently have an instagram account and havent for a while now. but like..i do miss having access to that sort of information because it would get me out of the apartment and involved in local community events. and now i never know what is going on in my city and don't go out as much. :/

so yay for not using evil meta bullshit that is increasingly janky and many kinds of fucked up. but like. if i had friends over on insta as well, it would make switching to a fedi platform a very hard sell: "come to this place where your friends are not, and probably no local information is available, and people will be continually pissy at you for not caring enough about technical things, and almost nobody wants to hear about the things you are interested in, and people dont want you there anyway because the low userbase is considered a feature not a bug". ya know? it is just a non-starter.

there are good things about fedi platforms too, but some of those good things are things normal people will simply not understand or care about no matter how frustrated it makes technical users. i wouldnt tell a friend to come here, i would simply tell them to use what they are using less often. and i am sure there will be people in this very thread thinking "good, we dont want idiots like you here", and that is indeed another part of why it is isolating for me to be here. :)

Yeah, and that's really the crux of it. To 90% of people, the content is all that matters. That's why comments like: "hey, you like TikTok? Why don't you try Loops instead?" or "Check out Pixelfed, it's a bit like Instagram!" are unlikely to work. For most people, it's just a strictly worse version. The same thing but without the content. Why would they downgrade for no reason?

You have to care about something external to the core experience of consuming content to actually be here. That's why our population at the moment is, well, just us here *gestures around.* You have to care about FOSS, or decentralisation, or anti-corporatism, or really value the more human interactions you get in a smaller setting with fewer bots, or actually enjoy putting in more work and get less served to you by an algorithm.

Most of the people with those values I believe will eventually trickle over here naturally. The rest though, this is a really hard sell for.

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.

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.

Threads is not part of the fediverse, it's part of Big Tech's attempt at Embrace, Extend, & Extinguish strategy!

Thank you for your answer. I want to start telling you, that your opinion on the whole topic is one of the most valuable answers.

You are the exact kind of people the fediverse needs and are adressing a couple of real issues the fediverse needs to work on. Helping small communities finding a way, maby to start briding their content over to the fediverse as easy as possible.
I think we need to start giving people like you an option to come here and stay here. Without loosing their access to their community.

In my opinion the fediverse lack of users is not a feautre. Its one of the worst things and it needs to fight that issue. And this is exactly where we need to find answers.
And is it really a thing that people will argue on here because they still use instagram or sth else?? Wtf!? We should be happy for every user trying to join the fediverse.

Maby talk to your community, If you want to help your community, maby start creating fediverse accounts for them.

Maby telling them about crossposting, that they can, if they want, post their activies throughout multiple social media at the same time, so as many people as possible can see it.
Well its getting more technically, I apologize!

This dude federates

😉

I'd say so, yeah. Either implement algorithms and deal with the consequences or design something that would make discovery of new content as easy as seeing it appear in your algorithmic feed, while avoiding all the problems that personalization brings.

Yeah, there's a reason many instances are defederated from Threads.
It's a classic strategy, and the only way to avoid it is to not give them the foothold they want.

I do understand wanting to give people a trial of sorts without having to dive in - but personally I reckon that's the best way to do this, and its the way I did during the first Reddit Exodus (RIP kBin)

As long as you do some research to avoid the more toxic spaces, and are respectful, people here will help you figure out the rest.

Honestly, yeah.

For certain niches, the Fediverse is great - but it absolutely does suck for local community stuff.

Big tech platforms make those hyper-niche communities easier to set up, in exchange for all that sweet sweet data - and that won't change anytime soon.

To do that on Fediverse you'd probably have to host an instance and get people to sign up if they aren't already. Which for a techy or privacy orientated group they might actually do - but I don't picture most hobbiest groups having the technical know-how or want to do that.

Maybe one day enough of the population will become tech-savy or privacy aware that niche local community Fedi instances might actually become a thing - but that day certainly isn't today

yes, ideally i would love for many local city councils to set up their own instances that local orgs, council services, businesses, and individuals can have relatively stable accounts on without having to worry about inter-instance fedi lore or trying to work out hosting for themselves when they aren't confident in technical matters. but unfortunately that's quite pie-in-the-sky dreaming right now!

I get the feeling but you will need to build some patience here.

It's really hard to move people from social media and they have to do it willingly otherwise we just create a ghost town here. What I do is try to share links when I see something someone might enjoy so they see there's other social media and sometimes I got asked like: "what was this social media like a twitter alternative?" And then you explain because they are interested but even then, the majority of cases they won't switch just because of that.

The only thing we can do is keep using it, keep improving it and when things get even worse than they are on monopoly land, we will be ready to take them :)

Loops has an algorithm. It growth is laughtable

I feel like it's both niche and not niche enough. Reddit has subreddits for all sorts of book series I enjoy but fediverse, if it has them at all, is largely empty of activity competitively.

Addiction … you can get that with any kind of social media. The Fediverse is no exception.

Easiest way is probably to find the Fediverse services that are most interesting to them, show them and explain how the Fediverse works. But even within the Fediverse many services don’t communicate much with each other. I know bunch of people IRL who are on Mastodon, but I don’t think I know anybody on Lemmy … at least not in the communities I interact most with.

It’s like with Linux, just get new friends.

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.

I think the broader idea is how to grow the Fediverse.

My suggestion is not your close friends, but instead what is your hobby? What is your interest? Because an interest group could build a social-network in the fediverse to keep hobbyists in contact and give them a place to share content they enjoy.

I don't see the Fediverse as dethroning the general generic networks that big social media networks make, that are all about engagement. Instead the fediverse can become a space for multiple niche networks pulled together by shared interests instead. Not all of them may choose to federate but they would drive overall uptake of the technology and platforms. From there other parts of the fediverse can grow.

What's crazy to me is that the barrier to entry is lower on the fediverse in my experience

I try to use the browser, it forces me to their app; I try to make an account, but I have to change my IP address several times and wait out attempt limits; I finally get an account working, and then it gets restricted and they wanna see my ID

Apps like summit and Jerboa are nice and smooth. It depends on the frontend entirely

That's why when I tell people about MULTIVERSE, I tell them it doesn't have ads, and the devs ain't using your data to rig the US presidential election.

That's what normal people care about.

You think you want this, but you don't.

Same. I had my new Bsky account suspended for using a VPN during the registration. I sent an email to their tech support explaining the situation. No response, account was never recovered.

I guess I'm not welcome on their platform lol.

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 think this is a missunderstanding. They are not on their phone for a whole hour. But they get their phone out every hour to watch reels for 2-3min.

If it's really only 3 minutes in the hour, maybe it's not so bad after all? If you are annoyed by the behavior, maybe just look for a way to nudge them out of it. Tell them that the first to reach for their phones has to pay the next round. You don't get to be preachy about it, but it forces them to be conscious about the habit.

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

Pulling out insta or tiktok or whatever is a purpose-built dark pattern. The algorithms, content, and user interface are designed to turn you into a mindless consumption machine because the more ads you scroll or affiliate items you purchase the more money they make. So I don't think the answer is "can we transfer their addiction to the fediverse."

The fediverse is not without friction and that should be acknowledged. There is not "put in your phone number, confirm text message, receive dopamine." You need to make an account with a password, choose an instance, some apps may have things to auto subscribe to for you, but most of that is on you. So they would need to want to switch, hurdle the friction, know that there is less content, and far less of it is built to provide dopamine hits so you scroll to the next ad. And if that is the fediverse you envision to get people onto it, I don't share that vision.

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.

Its a good idea overall but i cant even explain what a fediverse is

Don't even try to explain what the fediverse is. At best, note it's something like "the old forums from the 90s" or "some communities that affiliate with each other". They can get the broader understanding by experience and experimentation later, if they dare, and it's going to be a far more intuitive understanding than if we try to essay upon them.

It absolutely is, and it's harder than it seems.

Content curation and the "discovery problem" (which includes the algorithms of how we deliver search, feeds, recommendations, related content, news, current events, and more) of how people discover new-to-them content is a genuine and important problem. In fact, I believe it's so important that even the people who acknowledge it as a serious problem in places like the fediverse and the open web are generally underestimating how fundamentally important and challenging it actually is. It's a foundational and crucial prerequisite for any sort of information sharing and that gives it so much more significance that I think people struggle to actually follow how its ripples turn into waves. And it's a very hard one to solve, unfortunately.

(Editor's note: I begin descending into meandering philosophical nonsense beyond this point, proceed at your own risk.)

Without tackling that problem, which is still a largely unsolved problem at scale, and preferably doing so honestly (unlike the manipulative big tech engagement-farming, advertisement-selling "solutions" to this problem) we're always going to end up building disparate and disconnected silos of information that most people will never gain access to. And we all suffer because of that. We have come so close to tapping into the collective and cumulative knowledge that humanity and civilization has built up to this point, and now we are fighting against something similar to the last-mile problem of how do we actually enable all humanity to access and build on it. This requires both access and education, and it's hugely challenging, massively widespread and most of the time people can't even see the forest for the trees when it comes to this. We are on the verge of something genuinely transformative for civilization, and unlike the hype it's not all doomsday scenarios about AI taking over and killing all humans, it's about finding ways of giving real humans direct or indirect access to the overwhelming library of information that other humans have spent millennia building into a globe-spanning technological empire. That's the transformative part.

It's not about the success of companies or nations, it's about how effective we are at giving information to other humans, it's always been about that. The myth of Prometheus is sort of misleading. The person who actually changed the course of humanity's future isn't the one who first learned about fire (or any other tool we've learned to use), nor the one who discovered how to reliably create or use fire. In fact, there were probably many, many such people throughout humanity's history, but they either died with the knowledge or kept it secret and hidden until it died out again after a few generations when they refused to share it and others became jealous or threatened by it. They achieved little. The person who actually changed humanity's future is the person who, with that information, decided to teach it openly to someone else, not as magic or as a secret, but as something they could understand, something that became part of cultural practices, oral traditions, recorded histories, got turned into tools and equipment or some other form of institutionalized knowledge, something that people could then re-use and teach to the people who came after them, and let it spread from there to more and more people. Everything we have ever built is built entirely on top of education, teaching, documenting, and sharing information with others and thus with future generations and sustaining the information, building systems like language and writing to sustain that information further. Whenever that information comes to a dead end, it is lost, sometimes forever, and that's not a cautionary tale, that can happen, it does happen, it has happened. Even recently. Our success and progress is measured by our ability to transfer our knowledge, not by the knowledge we have at any given moment. Dumping our collective creativity and thoughts and independent research into an unsearchable, disorganized pile to be archived, forgotten and lost serves no-one. But how do we share it with others? How do we distill it so that the endless firehose of what's available still provides the information we need but doesn't hit us with brutal, overwhelming amounts of it? That's the fundamental question.

There's a bit of an issue with that. Re-Centralization. If the grand majority of users are in the "Main" or "Primary" instance, it's just moving one mass from one to another, without spread... The original problem the fediverse had (around twitter acquisition) was discoverability, I am not sure how much of an issue that might be yet, but it would affect how people across the verse find new things. Lemmy is one of those that thankfully, "just works", but the Friendica instance where I am seems to prioritize geographically local-first and barely anything else, unless specified... That could be a Friendica-specific issue though... Maybe Mastodon fairs better in this regard.

There's also a small solution I can think of for this... Does the Fediverse have an equivalent to matrix.to? Matrix.to (and instances of it) just redirects whatever client to whatever room on whatever homeserver. I personally think it'd be nice, if we have something similar, so that artists and vendors and similar, could, in theory, have a one-link to them, and have that also be a QR Code for them on their business cards too. -- I do apologize if this sounds corporate, but from where I'm from, if you wanna catch up on events on follow a new artist you, typically they use QR Codes.