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  • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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.

      • Keep that up for a few more months

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

        • 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

    • 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.

    • 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.

25 comments