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Supporting the Fediverse, one small act at a time
(blog.elenarossini.com)
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
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.
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.