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 @noodlejetski@lemm.ee 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?
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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.
Lots of content here feels like someone beta testing their manifesto the FBI will find
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.
if you don’t care enough about decentralization to lose out of a lot of content, theres literally no reason to be here.
Officially supported clients which are not the Reddit app
This was one of the reasons I left, and I assumed most disliked the official app, but weren’t willing to part with the content.
Now, I think I was too close minded. Stuck in my bubble. If it’s not in a discussion about reddit sucking, chances are people don’t care that much.
App sucks? Didn’t think about that, it’s just an app. App really sucks? Whatever, they already use 5 other apps that are worse.
The medium shapes the experience, but isn’t an experience unto itself. Not that important to the average person.
Ahh good call, I hated their official app.
@dch82 first, “normies” have to not get harassed when they come here.
Unfortunately the biggest Fedi software refuses to add automated reporting of offensive posts so if it’s not reported, the admins won’t even see it.
People coming from corporate social media are used to ignoring the report button because in their experience, it either doesn’t work, or gets ignored by admins anyway.
We need automated reporting.
We need automated reporting.
I’m fine with auto REPORTING, but the actual moderation needs to be a human. Auto moderation is bad. It gets things wrong. It’s how I got banned from both twitter (calm down, this was back in 2018 before it was an elon owned nazi cesspool), and reddit.
On twitter I saw a funny video that was posted, and I replied “Aw man, that killed me”.
I was banned for “inciting death threats”
@Lost_My_Mind yeah, just reporting.
I want to do the actual judgement, but if I don’t know the post exists, I can’t judge anything and it makes me so mad that possible racist stuff can exist on my instance without my knowledge because I havent “seen” it.
That’s the thing about automation and training models.
First, they implement some sort of auto-reporting bot that requires a human to review them. In the beginning, it only about 50% accurate, but as they give it more and more examples of good and bad results through the human reviews, it moves to 80%, then 90%, then 99%, then 99.99% accuracy.
After a while, the humans on the other end are so numb to the 9999 entries they have to mark as approved that they can barely tell what’s a rejection themselves, and the moderation team is asking itself just what this human review is actually doing. If it’s 99.99% accurate, why not let the bot decide?
Then, the model moves on from auto-reporting to auto-moderation.
Federated reporting would help too
@BeAware@social.beaware.live @dch82@lemmy.zip Maybe im a little lost. Isn’t there a block and report button on Mastodon? I’m using Misskey and both buttons seem to work. I mean im reporting to myself, but the button seems to work. What kind of automated blocking are you trying to do here?
@AterNox @dch82 blocking and reporting work fine.
However, people from corporate social media won’t report posts because in their experience, it either doesn’t get taken seriously or the admins ignore it. Corporate social media sites don’t exactly act on reports in a timely manner.
I’m on my own instance, I moderate for myself. I don’t want slurs to exist on my instance at all. However, if I don’t see them with my own eyes, I cannot ban the user.
PS. I’m talking about banning users that are harassing others on the instance level. These are user actions. I am an admin. I run my own instance.
I’m confused, do you mean like automated enforcement rules/algorithms like big SM has? I.e. if user gets reported for breaking Y rule X amount of times ban user for Z amount of time and forward to admin for further action?
@cm0002 no, I want automated reports.
A user using the n word, full on with the hard R, isn’t gonna be a good post. It should be automatically reported to me so that I can judge context and take action.
If a user doesn’t report it, I won’t see it.
I’m on my own instance, I am the user.
If I don’t report it, nobody sees it.
That’s dumb.
Ah, makes sense now, that is dumb. I can totally see why they would have issues with automated enforcement, but what you described I don’t see why anyone would be against it lol
@BeAware@social.beaware.live @dch82@lemmy.zip So Mastodon not have a wordlist you can populate that “removes” posts with the keywords you provide? It took me a while to find it in Misskey, works like a charm,
I unironically think it would be easier to train users that the report button works now than it would to get automated reporting that was worth a damn implemented.
We have instancewide admin blocks, so the accounts that would be automatically reported can be blocked preemptively, no report needed. That can be both good and bad… but pick a sheltered instance and you shouldn’t get harassed. How would automatic reporting even work? I don’t recall, but doesn’t the admin interface let you specify keywords that alert the admins in a post? Is that what you mean?
Unfortunately not. Mastodon has no such thing. It does have filtered words for normal users. However, that doesn’t do anything besides hide posts that contain the filtered words, nothing more.😬
Definitely. Back when I used FB and Twitter I learned that reporting is entirely useless. You just end up with some automated message about how they reviewed it and it “didn’t violate their community standards” with some lame verbiage like “we realize this isn’t the outcome you were looking for”, regardless of how ridiculously blatant whatever you reported was. On the flip side, I was banned for clearly misinterpreted or brigaded comments, and then an appeal just gives you the inverse where they reviewed it and whatever you posted was definitely terrible and they “realize this isn’t the outcome you were looking for”.
By automated reporting do you mean something like filters on the backend to flag offensive posts per some custom settings?
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.
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
.mlacting 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.mlinstances 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.
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.
Nowadays, I point to show that it’s more than just politics, news and tech
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.
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.
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.
I’m a developer, and it was a pain picking an instance. You start reading about them, and it turns out one’s censored, the other one’s communist, third one doesn’t cooperate with the other ones so you can’t see anything…
As long as it is like this, I don’t believe mass adoption is feasible. I would’ve given up because it takes a lot of time compared to just registering and off you go, but I was interested to see what’s all the ruckus after reddit started with censorship. Maybe interesting to mention that I was never an active reddit member (not one post there).
Indeed, nowadays I just send people to Lemm.ee
- neutral name (sorry SJW)
- second biggest instance
- almost no defederation
- no topic or country specific (I mean, technically Estonia, but everything happens in English, compared to feddit.org for instance)
almost no defederation
I don’t think this is really a good thing. Most people don’t want to bother curating their feed and if they get lots of bad stuff from instances that ought to be defederated, then they will leave.
-Neutral name (sorry SJW)
Boo this person! (I kid, don’t boo them, they’re doing good work and I understand if not everyone wants to be a sh.it.head)
Just send them to Lemmy world… Edge and shit lords will get banned and figure how this bitch works lol
Normies being on Lemmy world is better than. Reddit in my book
Just send them to Lemmy world
I agree that having a “default instance” would greatly help with onboarding new users, but as many others have said before, centralizing on the largest instance is not a good idea.
There are several other “general purpose” Lemmy instances. Why not send everyone to lemm.ee, until its size is close to lemmy world? At that point, start sending everyone to lemmy.sdf.org or lemmy.zip.
Great point!
I don’t know what other instances are viable bit we should have a place to get current preferred.
I just tell my peeps Lemmy.world it is like reddit with out going into details about fediverse since they ignore me once I start talking “federation”
The problem with this approach is that your peeps won’t see any reason to go there if it’s the same as the R-site only exponentially less popular.
There needs to be an understandable USP.
Perhaps: “But without ads. Ever. Anywhere.” Works for me and I know what an ad-blocker is, unlike a ton of normies.
Sincere question: what does “normie” exactly mean in the context of Lemmy? Is it a person that couldn’t get past setting up Lemmy account?
The term sounds like it has kinda elitist connotations. I mean I’ve set up Lemmy, but I don’t feel like I’m god given - maybe I should. 😆 (kidding, of course)
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Yea, instead of a default instance, I think there should be a default system that assigns you to one of a set of participating “general” instances without you having to decide or think about it.
Doesn’t https://join-lemmy.org/ do that?
AFAICT, it helps you pick an instance based on your interests, which only barely helps with the problem. If you’re new to the ecosystem, you typically just want to join in and see what’s going on before making any decisions. And you probably don’t want to bother with selecting criteria for a selection guide at all.
What I’m suggesting is clicking a button “Sign Up”, enter credentials, verify and done. Then allow the whole finding an instance process pan out naturally.
Part of the issue IMO is that how an instance advertises itself isn’t necessarily how it will be seen by someone … they need to see it for themselves.
Part of the issue IMO is that how an instance advertises itself isn’t necessarily how it will be seen by someone … they need to see it for themselves.
Indeed
And then we will get more communities being created on Lemmy world, and then the whole Fediverse depends on one single instance. This seems like a good idea at first, but won’t stand the test of time.
I am trying to convince more instance admins to install Fediverser on their servers, so that we can have a way to point people to one site that can distribute the users and help with onboarding and discovery. But so far none of the admins really seem to be interested in the having to deal with the potential influx of users from Reddit.
I am trying to convince more instance admins to install Fediverser on their servers, so that we can have a way to point people to one site that can distribute the users and help with onboarding and discovery
What does Fediverser from an admin standpoint? Does it just enable a “Login with Reddit” option for onboarding new users?
That is the main thing, yes, but it would also allow for better coordination among the instances for migration efforts. “Fediversed” Instances can keep of redditors that migrated, can have more attributes to display for people when selecting a instance, can accept or reject a Redditor based on certain criteria (e.g, account is too new, or was flagged as a spammer, or is posting a language different from the main language in the server, etc)
I’m surprised nobody has mentioned porn yet. Like it or not, it does drive growth.
That’s what I’m trying to do with https://xxxiver.se
I think porn creators would actually benefit enormously from using fediverse services. They own their data/platform, they can’t get kicked off, etc.
wow! that’s cool. Good job!
Yeah, porn is the only reason I still visit Reddit from time to every day.
Same. The volume of porn on reddit is staggering. On Lemmy most of the porn comes from repost bots with 0 quality filter or God awful AI bullshit.
there is lemmynsfw
I’m very well aware. I frequent that server.
cool
Don’t.
I like what this is, I don’t want it to become everything for everyone
Agreed. Look what Reddit turned into. Better to have fewer but higher quality comments than a sea of the same tired jokes and ancedotes over an over again.
I don’t like that there’s so few people questioning the core concept of “one platform for everyone”.
Why does it have to appeal to everyone? Why can’t its audience be a subset of humanity who like nerdy shit? It’s what I liked about Reddit in the early years - it wasn’t completely inaccessible but it was niche enough that there was a bit of a filter, allowing me to find content and people that appealed to me.
Aiming for lowest common denominator doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.
By permitting advertising.
“Normies” are not “microbloggers”. Most people just want to follow what their friends and family and news organizations and “influencers” are posting.
My biggest gripe with the fediverse (indirectly) is that all the information I would get on Twitter about my city is not available to me - concert announcements, restaurant specials, road closures, major news, hobby meetups, etc. They’re posting on Facebook and Instagram (which is IMO the worst of all social platforms) and slowly adopting Threads. My issue with these platforms is mostly regarding the algorithm deciding what it thinks you want. This is driven by advertising.
Twitter didn’t really pick up steam until celebrities and news outlets were posting and engaging on the platform. Then they pushed hard for ads to increase revenue and expand features and stability (for better or worse). Then they just got greedy. Then they were sold for the dumbest amount of money in the history of sales.
Getting normies here means getting influencers here. Influencers want to make money for being assholes. If you don’t want influencers and ads here, don’t ask for the normies to come. Accept the beauty of this micro micro blogging platform. If you want to share outside the open fediverse, embrace cross posting to the closed platforms. That’s kind of the whole point of it. You can post in your tiny little corner while still engaging with the more popular platforms.
TL;DR: be careful what you wish for.
By permitting advertising.
Reaches for pitchfork.
TL;DR: be careful what you wish for.
Puts pitchfork down, embarrassed cough.
I don’t work in tech and I’m not a video game player. Am i a normie? I stay on Facebook because of the things you mentioned - i want to know how my old aunt is doing, get the link to my cousin’s music performances, see what play or concert is showing this weekend, and post to my neighborhood when my dogs escape. I only used Twitter to follow local bars, restaurants, and music venues for happy hours and event info. That kinda died with covid so i closed my Twitter account. I don’t really understand influencers. I’d love to see more local content here but I’m not sure we have the people to support it. I guess the way to start is to share the local info i get from Facebook to the Texas and dfw communities here, but that doesn’t draw more people. Among my friends, r/ is sort of made fun of as something their husbands follow for jokes, memes, and boobs.
I should edit my comment and add “post rage bait”.
You’re absolutely right. I’d describe myself similarly to you. I even created a local community here for my city. But it feels like I’m speaking quietly on top of a mountain while the nearest person is a time zone away. Perhaps a handful of people would stop by and subscribe to the content but this isn’t about subscribing - it’s about engaging. Communities are about exchanging ideas. Posting something that compels people to engage is one way to increase activity. As more people notice the community, they’ll be more likely to engage when there’s enough noise around that doesn’t single them out too much.
The major social platforms know this. This is why they promote trash over quality information. This is why I get frustrated on Instagram because it continues to show me posts from two or three days ago notifying me that I missed an exciting event.
You can post all the great informative content you want on your little corner of the fediverse but without engagement, is it really there?
I even created a local community here for my city.
Which city is it?
Exactly why fediverse will never go mainstream with the normies.
I’m guessing a lot of comments will be of the “why do we want to?” variety.
Quite. Go to the big services that know how to moderate and maintain (and importantly pay for) a public square. But also encourage the interesting ones enable federation for wider coverage.
You don’t. If they don’t wanna be here, don’t take on this huge crusade to get them here. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. They must take the final step themselves.
Focus on making lemme a desirable place to be, less on getting people to use the communication tool you happen to prefer.
The reason I personally don’t recommend or hardly even mention Lemmy to anyone else is because here’s hardly any content they’d be interested in. The vast majority of posts are quite esoteric and directed at the kind of people who already are here.
Did you have a look at !newcommunities@lemmy.world ? There are threads with different topics with active communities.
Discoverability of smaller communities is definitely an issue we are trying to solve with this.
Make it look like a centralised system initially. Provide a portal to a pre vetted/chosen instance that is accepting new members in their locale/country, that is the same for everyone.
Update: This (above) is badly written. I’m trying to say every potential new member gets presented with the same (pretend centralised) portal that is in fact an (valid long-lived) instance local to the individual potential for them to sign up with. So two local users in Oz get given a proxy to the instance local to them, and a user in Blighty an instance local to that person. The decentralised Lemmy looks centralised, but isn’t. The proxy front end should explain that they’re joining their local instance and it’s like a network of little affiliated clubs that can see each others posts globally. they log in for the first time it will become clear.
It’s late, I’m tired, sorry everyone. Is that any better?
I think it’s confusing (the reverse of what they’re used to) for a newbie who have been bought up in a centralised internet with single front ends of all the big players to be presented with little instances to join to access the whole.
How hard would it be to create a little quiz that directs or chooses an instance based on your interests?
I think the hard part would be keeping it up to date as instances change
True. I forgot how easily an instance could disappear overnight. Happened to me in another instance
Isn’t it like https://kbin.world was back then? (when /kbin was still a thing?)
When you entered that page, it determined your location from IP address and redirected you to a magazine for your country, as shown on kbin.social.
Well, this could be repeated now, but for lemmy instances. We already have umpteen of regional/local ones, and they are on every continent of the world.
I don’t know, I’m not familiar with kbin at all. Good to know I’m not alone in that thinking, though.
It would have helped me. My instance isn’t in the same hemisphere as me!
You can move to a closer one by exporting and importing your settings from the parameters
Thank you for thinking forward. That’s much appreciated.
I’m surprised to find there isn’t much of a delay to loading the data from Oz. I’m sure I remember it being horrific not so long ago.
I send people links to posts on Lemmy, and tell people I can’t see Instagram/Twitter/etc.
Is it working? No, not really, but it feels like it should.
Thank you for trying
You can’t, because normies don’t care about tech other than it benefits them directly in some way. They care about the experience they get and doing the same thing everyone does because normies are like sheeps.
Normies barely even get how emails work and it’s been like over 40 years. They know if they sign up for Gmail it’s free, they get a ton of space and an @gmail.com address. That’s it.
And even then, people looked at me weird back in 2007 when I made my Gmail account because “everyone uses Hotmail, why wouldn’t you use Hotmail, everyone uses it so it must be the best”. Heck just yesterday, the teller at the mechanic shop looked at me weird because I used $storename@max-p.me to place the online order, they were utterly confused. They thought I made a Gmail or Outlook for all of those aliases. People don’t think about using emails, they think about using Gmail or Hotmail/Outlook.
Same with Reddit, it didn’t become popular until normies felt like they were missing out by not being on Reddit, and arguably that was Reddit’s downfall flooding the site with the same repeated arguments and opinions over and over. And for that too, I’ve been told my “Reddit looks weird” because I use a third-party app. People want to use Reddit so they download Reddit.
Normies don’t use Twitter because they want to microblog, they use Twitter because their idols are on Twitter and they want to mimic them. If Taylor Swift opened a Mastodon account and posted exclusively there, we’d get a massive spike of users. And they all would want to register on the same instance as her and it would be the only viable instance to them.
They just want to fit in and do the same as the others, using the same services and same apps and everything. “Influencers” are everything these days.
The best way to get normies on the Fediverse is IMO, endorsing Threads and BlueSky, which will effectively force them to integrate because those platforms integrate.
Fedi client app developers need to design fedi client apps in a holistic way to include a custom server (as with Mammoth’s moth.social) or create an account for the user on one of a curated selection of other servers, without forcing the user to choose one.
It’s a severe problem with trying to grow fedi that general users are expected to understand how servers work and make an informed decision about which one to join. General users don’t care about this topic and will quickly turn away when it is forced upon them. That’s why the client app needs to handle this for the user without making a fuss about it.
These apps also need good discovery features and feeds with posts that are trending generally and for specific topics. Then devs need to make money with those apps somehow, then they need to market those apps (at this point, it goes beyond just “devs” and expands into an organization with a marketing department, etc.).
Then, hopefully fedi’s inherent advantages of interoperability and resilience will naturally cause people to choose these user-friendly, effectively marketed fedi client apps over things like Instagram, Tiktok, etc. After all, if it can’t compete on its own merits with all other factors being equal, there’s no point to it for most people.
- Fix picking an instance. It’s an irredeemably bad UX, even for tech people who could run an instance if they wanted to. Gotta remove that as an initial UX barrier first, which would require a new layer of system with integration with all of the clients.
- Accept that this isn’t like mainstream social media and likely never will be, even if instance picking becomes easier for newcomers. So instead focus on what can be done well here. IMO it’s customisable community building.
Currently all the big fediverse platforms kinda suck at this, in part because it likely requires a bunch of features, but also because they’re all made in imitation of big social platforms that were always less “homely” and more engagement farms.
To bring normies, something new and unique needs to be offered. IMO there could be a rich ecosystem of content and structures and communities that draws people in.
My fear is that the protocol and federation are the limiting factors on this, and so I suspect some restructuring or redesign is necessary.
