It’s still very early on, but a theme discussed in the video is worth repeating here: if the Fediverse is so great (ethical, devoid of advertising or toxic, addictive algorithms, with the goal of genuinely connecting people) why is it that the general public has not heard of it?

The futurology.today instance I'm an admin/mod of has the added benefit of being a direct sibling of r/futurology on Reddit which has 21 million users (I, and the other Mods also mod it).

Despite over a year promoting it on the subreddit, 3/4 of the instances users are from the fediverse, not Reddit.

Maybe the fediverse needs some breakthrough with usability, discovery and appeal?

Its bizarre that finding and subscribing to other instances is still so painful and backwards.

Why can't we have new account types already subscribed to a 'top 100 instances' ? Instant improvement.

[–] imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

We've kinda been hibernating since July 2023, with the userbase rapidly declining from that peak and then remaining nearly constant for the entirety of 2024. Honestly it's quite impressive that we held such a steady monthly user count for the past year.

But now with all the publicity around the fediverse, we are beginning to pick up some organic momentum again. We've grown by about 2k active users in January (~5% growth). Keep that up for a few more months and it will start to become noticeable with more activity, which should hopefully start a positive feedback loop.

Regarding finding and subscribing to communities on other instances, I'm pretty sure this tool addresses that problem fairly effectively.

https://lemmy-federate.com/

You may want to add your instance to that.

[–] Die4Ever@programming.dev 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Keep that up for a few more months

I'm not confident that the internet's attention span is that long, unfortunately

[–] imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

That's fair, but also reddit will continue to make unpopular decisions, and we are already the default alternative. Just have to wait and see

[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago (6 children)

I mean, I feel it's a misunderstanding of what users actually use social media for.

Just of top of your head, can you list three reasons they want to join the Fediverse for a "normal" Reddit user? Because I struggle to name one, nevermind three. There's all the technical reasons, ethical stuff, etc. But that's all something that enthusiasts would consider, and it goes against how the vast vast majority of users use social media where the more centralized the better as it multiplicatively expands the pool of content and interactions to have everyone centralized.

The Fediverse shows this, in fact! Note how resistant users are to spread over instances, in fact being always after centralizing on the bigger ones. But this isn't a bad thing really, as it's simply the nature of social media. Of course far less necessary on federated stuff, but there's also no reason not to (again, from the perspective of someone wanting to use social media, not advocate).

It's not an easy thing to do to get users here. The place inherently doesn't appeal to those it would need to appeal to.

[–] Lugh@futurology.today 7 points 1 week ago

Just of top of your head, can you list three reasons they want to join the Fediverse for a “normal” Reddit user?

I agree, there is no reason for most of them to. Why leave a place full of conversation to join somewhere where there is hardly any?

That said, many people want to to abandon traditional social media sites like Twitter/X and Facebook - Bluesky has been a huge beneficiary.

If it did things differently, there is every reason to think the fediverse could benefit from that transition. This trend of turning against the old social media , especially as it has aligned itself with the far right, is only going to accelerate.

[–] muelltonne@feddit.org 3 points 1 week ago

The fediverse offers a noncommercial alternative and that can be a draw. A "normal" Reddit user might not want to join us, but there will be users fed up with all the ads on Reddit, some of Reddits policies, tolerance of nazis and abuse and so on. Mastodon always was in the shadow of Twitter, a nice, but blew up when Musk started to destroy it. It offered a way out and that is worthwhile. And if Zuckerberg is starting to transform Instagram into a rightwing horror show, Pixelfed is there as an alternative. And if you want out of YouTube, PeerTube is working and ready for you.

[–] 3dmvr@lemm.ee 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Bluesky really swooped in with their marketing, that shift shouldve gone to mastodon.

[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

Mastodon did it to themselves.

There's a reason Bluesky has a UI that's more or less exactly like old Twitter. It makes for a smooth transfer.

[–] 3dmvr@lemm.ee 2 points 1 week ago

No one likes ads or people with money influencing what they can see, its all anyone is complaining about on social media especially with the tiktok ban, thats why pixelfed has an influx, every other post I see is "block facebook block musk fix your algorithim bs" they would prefer an owned by the ppl social media id they knew of it and if it was as functional.

I didn't even know lemmy existed til a week before I got banned off reddit, thought voat was still around lol. Thats also because I specifically asked for alts on the alt subreddit.

[–] imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I agree with you, but I feel that you're glossing over the bigger point. In my view, you're right about the way most social media users behave, but that behavior is also bound to slowly change as people get a better grip on how it is effecting them in a negative way. We as a society are learning the hard way about how toxic social media can be.

Most people are dumb and they don't have time to consider whether something is better or worse, especially something as new as social media. But when they start to notice other people (like us!) doing something differently and having a better experience, they eventually catch on and change their behavior.

It's like how it took a long time for people to stop smoking cigarettes, but once the tide turned it happened within a couple generations. Or wearing seat belts, or any other new, cool technology/product that people eventually started to understand better and adapt to after a few generations. Social media is like that, and we are simply the early adopters of a more humane and healthy form of social media. It takes a long time, but people will eventually start to understand how corporate social media is an unhealthy and exploitative habit, and this decentralized, community driven model is a much better experience.

[–] 3dmvr@lemm.ee 0 points 1 week ago

Reddit mods suck, reddit karma system sucks for new users so we have that over them (they can barely comment and cant post), reddit censors all the time at least once most ppl have been temp banned or had a comment/post removed that they thought wasn't controversial. The algorithim is forcing controversy, cant avoid negative subreddits, your subscribed feed will show you stuff you arent subscribed to from communities that you downvote.

Reddit just has the ppl that have been there forever and are addicted to answering questions for dopamine hits. Whats annoying is reddit tends to have ppl that are at the intermediate level of each niche so the advice/info they give gets popular and parroted while it may not be the best.

Major issue with reddit is shills and bots, you cant trust reccs on their anymore, gotta look through profile history, might be slightly better here due to them not targetting us.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

It relates to Lemmy's roots among self-hosters - the idea being that, as a user of Arch btw, someone could simply subscribe to whatever content they wanted, and then not have to pull down and retain stuff that they did not want (which could also be a bit dangerous, e.g. child pornography).

But if you want to contribute to the codebase the functionality that you are talking about, that's awesome.

It won't solve the major problems though: lack of overall content, lack of organization of content (though here the Lemmy alternative PieFed has an amazing start in its Topics feature - one day not too far distant I expect PieFed will overtake Lemmy), and contentious users that will troll and make fun of ESPECIALLY people from a Western nation (do an experiment: using GOOGLE, not Duck Duck Go or Kagi or anything other than what a non-technical normie would do, and look at the top instance that it recommends, and maybe count the number of posts that make fun of the USA, which btw is where the vast majority of Reddit users are from). Trying to avoid the trolls here on Lemmy takes an EXTREME amount of effort, which to me explains why literally 100% of the people that I've told irl about Lemmy have actually chided me for having recommended it to them (and when you do that experiment, you should see it first-hand yourself, although tbf now that the USA election season is over perhaps the rhetoric has been toned down? I haven't tried lately).

Edit: here is a prior example that occurred just prior to the election, informing us how Biden and Trump were exactly tHe SaMe ThO:

I believe the lesson attempted to be imparted here is how despite the fact that Russia and China and North Korea are "not" doing genocide (any attempts to say otherwise result in site-wide bans), it is the USA that is bad, and more generally capitalism and the West (here, it helps to realize that Russia and China are "not" capitalist, in this formulation).

Anyway, the most important bits are how: (1) Google searches directs people to this instance, among all of them, bc it was one of the first and most popular, and (2) it has its feed set to show only Local posts by default for new users. They will see such anti-Western propaganda, and will miss all the other great content on other instances across the Fediverse. And then go back to Reddit complaining that Lemmy is the place made by tankies who got kicked out of Reddit for being too extreme. Which, tbf, is the actual truth.

[–] Kichae@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago

Well, it really depends on what one wants the fediverse to be. Should it be homogenized? Or heterogeneus? Having new servers auto-synchronize with the "top" (however one defines this) existing sites promotes homogeneity and the simulation of centralized social media. This seems to be what people here today want.

But if you're creating a simulacrum of centralized social media, you have to answer the question: Why wouldn't I just stay on an actually centralized service?

The fesiverse has the chance to be something new, if we just abandon the desire to make believe that it's like what we already have.

[–] 4Robato@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago

I agree with the whole thing but remember that the Fediverse as it grows it will face the same challenges as any other social media does when it grows. I 100% agree that it's important that social media has to be decentralized and away from corporations but as people join the Fediverse, corporations will pick up on that and I'm sure we will end up with private companies doing apps for the Fediverse that will contain algorithms and all that kind of stuff. (I mean you can already see threads which is federated with the Fediverse).

Having the Fediverse doesn't guarantee that everything will be nice and good (though it's a very important step) but the same that happens with e-mail nowadays with google that we are all almost using the same platform even though it is a decentralized system and it's not open source.

The Fediverse is decentralized AND open source nowadays but that doesn't mean it's how it will always be. I hope people remembers in the future that it's important to support the open source platforms we have in the early days and they don't jump ships when a private company opens a new fancy app. Let's remember the lessons we just learned and remember, we currently have a decentralized AND open source social media because we have a lot of people doing hard work on it, let's support them and educate people about the importance of the topic.

[–] atro_city@fedia.io 10 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Yeah, drop the name of fediverse platforms in discussions with your friends, share links directly to content on here, share articles about it, but don't be obnoxious about it - you're also a part of it, and if people associate obnoxious behavior with the fediverse, they might be less inclined to join it.

[–] IDKWhatUsernametoPutHereLolol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 week ago

they might be less inclined to join it.

"I use Arch btw"

[–] 3dmvr@lemm.ee 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Does fediverse have good normie stuff? My friends use x mostly for discussing sports.

[–] stevo887@lemmings.world 1 points 6 days ago

While not part of the fidiverse but still decentralized BlueSky would be the place to go for sports content.

[–] atro_city@fedia.io 1 points 1 week ago

Normies have to play a part in generating content. Can't expect a bunch of nerds to talk about sports. But if they're on Xitter, probably mastodon would be the equivalent platform. They could move their discussions there.

[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 1 week ago

if the Fediverse is so great (ethical, devoid of advertising or toxic, addictive algorithms, with the goal of genuinely connecting people) why is it that the general public has not heard of it?

Oh for about the same reason big media is suddenly all fine and dandy with Nazis, I'd think. Money talks, and for people with cages, if you can't promote yourself for some reason then at least you promote each other.

[–] sam@bikersgo.social 8 points 1 week ago

This is an amazing article and makes me want to do so much more than I've already been doing to help put the Fediverse out there for people.

[–] Matombo@feddit.org 4 points 1 week ago

sad no element/matrix icon noises q.q

[–] Mac@mander.xyz 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Does anyone have the promo image?

[–] squirrel@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 week ago

It's available on Wikimedia Commons