Fediverse

28362 readers

1050 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!

Rules

Posts must be on topic.
Be respectful of others.
Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

141

How do we get "normies" to adopt the Fediverse? (self.fediverse)

submitted 2 months ago by dch82 to c/[email protected]

167 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Since most people are talking about the sign-up barriers, I'll mention culture and reputation.

I love Lemmy and Mastodon, but whenever I've seen the fediverse brought up elsewhere, someone inevitably shuts down any curiosity by suggesting that it's a political echo-chamber. I don't think that's accurate for all of it, but if that reputation is out there, we probably need to make an effort to show that there's a broader appeal. If the average person is expecting the fediverse to be the left-wing equivalent of something like "Truth Social", I could understand the reluctance to adopt it.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

someone inevitably shuts down any curiosity by suggesting that it's a political echo-chamber

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I think .ml acting as the official or at least de-facto "flagship" instance is doing more harm than good. I've seen the same arguments you mentioned, and it always seems to go back to either of the two .ml instances or Hexbear. When political ideology is forced into every interaction, it always seemed it was coming from one of those three.

I've shown people Lemmy World as an example that it's not all political circlejerks, but I don't know how many of them stuck with it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

Completely agree. I had no idea how bad this phenomenon was until very recently, when I fell foul of a virtual lynch mob and its political-commissar mod who behaved like a religious inquisitor even in private conversation. It's real.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

Nowadays, I point to show that it's more than just politics, news and tech

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Every social media has the same problem, reddit is on one side, twitter on the other, facebook is filtering by their own goals.

People here are just a bit different angle. But each instance is a little different, lemmy.world is more reddit like, lemmy.ml is leftist, hexbear is... something too, there are probably some right wing instances. Much more diverse than other networks and I enjoy seeing all those different point of views.

This is current problem in society that we don't tolerate different opinion.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

This is current problem in society that we don't tolerate different opinion.

Exactly this. When online platforms become too homogeneous, any deviation from the typical opinions that are shared seems like a terrible, inexcusable offense that someone must do something about - thus, reinforcing the bubble.

We need to be able to disagree with each other and still get along.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Twitter was quite diverse actually (it might still be, I can't say). You had the far left, far right, and everything in between on there but it worked somewhat because the algorithm kept people mostly in their bubbles unless they went seeking it out.