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,

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.

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.

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 a 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.

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.

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!

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!

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

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

Yeah, the Fediverse needs different ways to promote itself. Very few people give a flying flip about decentralization or open source, but some people might be interested in:

-Giving less power to Sam Altman (partial owner of Reddit), Zuck, Musk et. al

-Not having everything you post directly given to OpenAI for AI training

-Lack of psychologically manipulative algorithms

-Fewer ads

-Different moderation, maybe (if someone has had issues with being threatened on Xitter or having posts auto-removed somewhere or something)

-More human interactions

You’re still not going to get most people to move over based on those things, but you might get more.

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.

This is exactly why corporations/governments want to keep them tired and not caring. That’s how they get them to stay on large social media platforms where they can send millions of bots to shift the vote their way through propaganda, and it never ends, never gets better. It’s a dream for an authoritarian who thinks everything big brother did in 1984 was the best idea ever.

And to your point, the people keep having those problems because they are giving every shred of their money and data to massive corporations without a minuscule thought of how it affects other people. It’s a downward spiral from there.

Location being constantly tracked because you use google services turns into tracking where you shop turns into tracking your buying habits turns into…hey, we can charge this fool even more for the product they’re buying, and they’ll keep buying it! Even better we can create 56 fake brands all within a few cents differing price of each other so no one knows what product is actually good, and make millions of bot reviews so those aren’t reliable either!

All because people can’t be bothered to just think about who they are giving their data to.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Honestly I think that’s one thing we could learn from BSky. They have algorithms but they’re created and shared by the community. Basically “choose your own algorithm”.

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.

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

Note the word “entry.” The likelihood that someone doesn’t already have an account on Twt/Insta/FB/etc. and is making an account on the Fediverse has got to be near zeroo. No one is ever gonna hear about the Fediverse first before other major social media platforms unless they’re a literal child who is getting their first ever account.

So yes, while making a second acc on social media platforms is a major pain-in-the-ass, most people already have their account + app and don’t have to deal with that shit.

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.

Maybe don’t explain the Fediverse. If they dislike AI, just say you use a Reddit alternative that isn’t partially owned by Sam Altman. If they’re concerned about being addicted to Instagram, say you use an Instagram alternative without the addictive algorithms.

Yeah, Lemmy/Fediverse has a very specific brand of niche and very few others. I’m missing those book/media-related communities here too. Fedi needs more niches.