This is a follow-up from my previous thread.
The thread discussed the question of why people tend to choose proprietary microblogging platfroms (i.e. Bluesky or Threads) over the free and open source microblogging platform, Mastodon.
The reasons, summarised by @[email protected] are:
- marketing
- not having to pick the instance when registering
- people who have experienced Mastodon’s hermetic culture discouraging others from joining
- algorithms helping discover people and content to follow
- marketing
and I’m saying that as a firm Mastodon user and believer.
Now that we know why people move to proprietary microblogging platforms, we can also produce methods to counter this.
How do we get “normies” to adopt the Fediverse?
Stop addressing them as “normies” would be a great start.
Can’t speak for rest of the Fediverse as I’m not super active on microblogging anymore, but at least here on Lemmy, there is such a strong “in” culture and quirky skewed perception of the world, and often times come off as actively hostile against those that do not share the same quirky skewed world view. The anti-AI, anti-corporate, would rather shoot myself in the foot if it’s not FOSS, etc kind of views, with their own strong vocal proponents, comes off as unwelcoming. People are addicted to socials because of the positivity they can get, not the negative sentiments that’s often echo’ed.
Amongst those that doesn’t share the kind of view, you’d already be looking at an extreme small minority that might be willing to give the platform a try, but as long as the skewed perception of the world dominates the discussions, you can expect them to go back to main stream centralized platforms where they can get more main stream view points based discussions.
Thats the neat part, you don’t. Social medias value isn’t determined by it’s tech. Its value is determined by who and what you can interact with. For example, people wont leave Facebook because everyone they know is on facebook because people won’t leave Facebook. Twitter is literally run by a nazi at this point and still it’s the same story where Mastodon and Bluesky aren’t even close. Same thing for reddit and lemmy. Lemmy simply doesn’t have the content reddit does, look no further than sports subreddits where any given game has a live game thread with a hundred or more unique commentors.
If you want mode people to come here you’re going to need to do two things. One you need to post content people want to see, and two you need to get very very lucky because as it stands if you don’t care enough about decentralization to lose out of a lot of content, theres literally no reason to be here. Its a long slow road and you’re still going to need reddit to do something stupid before we see another growth spike.
Officially supported clients which are not the Reddit app