Have any of y’all convinced somebody to make the switch? If so, how’d it go? What worked and what needs work?
The way to grow the fediverse is getting real life communities to build local instances and connect them up with others.
A good example is Universities - these are dynamic communities pf young people that could benefit from campus wide social networks of Mastodon, Lemmy, pixelfed etc. Joining these up with other university networks would create shared spaces, and as people graduate and leave university they would hopefully continue to participate in broader genera sharedl communities.
Other communities to target might be small towns, neighbourhoods or even cities.
This is exactly how Facebook grew. It target universities and green organically - although it did also use an idea of “exclusivity” and invites to draw people in to the network which may not be feasible for the fedoverse. But the “local social network” to “global social network” itself is a viable route to growth.
So instead of people trying to persuade individuals to join a global network they should be thinking about how they can support exisitng local or small groups onto things like a campus social network. Sports clubs, hobby groups, and even just popular shared hobbies and unterests. Things that people are already in communities for but may appreciate their own locally controlled instances of fediverse tools which they can federate into bigger whole.
Localism is a big strength for the fediverse and is where I’d target growth.
I think Mobilizon and Gancio have a huge role to play here. Very strange that Mobilizon doesn’t have a significant English language server (last I checked anyway).
Lemmy doesn’t have a significant USA instance either when you think about it, the three most active are midwest.social (region focused), discuss.online and lemmy.today. None of them are in the top 20
when you link to a post, such as this: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/35480016
it opens it on the server of the post, not on your home server, so you can’t directly vote or comment.
The current lemmy UI doesn’t do it, but other UIs like tesseract handle this natively.
While it technically works, it actually prevents frontends from handling it natively. For example if I click a lemmyverse.link on tesseract, I’ll be redirected to lemmyverse, wait 3 seconds, then end up outside tesseract, which is now annoying,
Indeed, but on the other hand it’s front end independent. Pick your poison I guess
My understanding is that there’s currently not a better way to do it
I was unaware of this project. Will be using going forward
Tech literacy is definitely a problem. I see laziness from from fellow sysadmins on making the switch to Lemmy because “it’s too confusing”. I’ve seen some decent graphics people have made attempting to simplify how this all works - I bet having one handy when convincing a friend to join would be helpful.
On a similar note - patience and understanding will be big. If a newbie makes an honest question and they get met with “RTFM” or anything similar then I think it risks a bad first impression of the community which could turn away someone that could’ve been a long time user. My philosophy will be to address any question, big or small, with respect. We should be happy someone is interested in learning more!
Tech literacy is definitely a problem
Honestly, I don’t buy it when people say this. I think they’re just resistant to change. Which is OK! But I don’t think we need to get caught up in explaining the details. If something doesn’t work, we just say “Well it’s brand new” and pivot to whatever features we think they’ll like.
My philosophy will be to address any question, big or small, with respect. We should be happy someone is interested in learning more!
This is so important thank you for saying that.
I agree that people are resistant to change. This is a tough problem to overcome… change comes from within.
I also agree that the fediverse doesn’t necessarily need how it works overexplained to a new users. Many car-owners probably don’t even have a basic understanding of how a motor vehicle works and yet in the US it’s hard to imagine living without one. What matter is that it’s intuitive to use and isn’t too complicated to learn.
I think if I can take a stab at tying both of these points together regarding growing the fediverse it’s that continued development of the fediverse applications are essential. Give people an intuitive product that works and the masses will want to come use it. Give people products that are easy to learn and function properly. And of course the beauty of open source projects are that anyone and everyone with programming know-how can help with this. Lemmy has gotten way better since I first joined but of course there’s still room for improvement.
Convince your uncles and aunts to join TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram /s but not really
