Having spent a lot of time on Mastodon… There are tons of people there talking about federated and self-hosted services, software freedom, censorship, encryption, tech regulation… A very narrow range of topics directly surrounding the fediverse get a lot of attention.
But nobody talks about anything else. Nobody goes to Instagram to talk about Instagram, nobody goes to Tiktok to talk about Tiktok, nobody goes to Facebook (at all). People use social media to either talk to their friends or talk about their hobbies and interests.
And if your hobby is tech, that’s fine, enjoy. I like tech too. But please, if you have anything else to say, say it. The fediverse will never appeal to the masses if we don’t embrace a wide variety of hobbies and interests.
We need people here talking about cooking. We need people here talking about fashion. We need people here talking about immigration policy. We need people here talking about everything people enjoy!
Yes, if you go to /m/fashion right now, it’s… barely there. You’re not going to get a ton of conversation when you post there. But that’s not the point. The point is to build out the community, so that, a year from now, as more and more people attempt to post and engage, there is a conversation. There’s a reason to be on the fediverse besides the meta circlejerk over how great the fediverse could be in theory.
This is the “content” people are craving. Find or start a magazine for your city, or your town, or your country. Write a post. Share posts from your favorite blogs. Comment on something, if you have anything to say at all. Share a youtube video—yes, a youtube video, I know, youtube sucks, but at least it gives us a path to a community here.
That’s because the companies take care of the techie stuff, while in the fediverse, we have to do that. So, it’s natural, I guess 🤷.
I don’t think most of us actually want that. Then, it’ll become just like FB or Insta… the crowd I mean. The point is to attract the right audience, not just any audience.
See, that is exactly what I want to get away from… you have that on TikTok and FB/Insta. That is exactly what I don’t want to see here. Of course, anyone can open a comm like that, I probably wouldn’t block it, but short clips of someone roasting hotdogs with cheese and calling that a super easy and healthy meal… nah, that is not for me.
Fashion as well. Those topics are for influencer wannabe types. That’s not what we’re trying to build here, are we?
Apparently, people around here are not interested in that topic 🤷. I’m sure a comm like that would be very popular on Insta.
Once again, the kind of people we’re not trying to attract anyway.
Right now, it’s attracting a circlejerk of people who only want to talk about how good the fediverse can be. I don’t know what you mean by “the right audience,” but this is not an audience I or anybody else wants to spend time around, and it’s not an audience that can build real collective knowledge or anything like that.
My menswear friends aren’t coming anywhere near the fediverse. Not because they’re “the wrong audience” and the fediverse only appeals to cool people, but because there’s nobody talking about menswear and the fediverse doesn’t appeal to people.
Why do you follow it if you don’t want to see it?
I don’t see anything on FB or IG that I don’t avail myself of. I follow users I want to follow. I go on reddit, I join subreddits I want to join. I don’t have to run away from the content I pick.
Tiktok is dumb though, IDK why you’d want to see algorithm-selected content like that.
I mean, you’re free to downvote that nonsense. It’s certainly not a problem on Reddit, it only exists in the subreddits that are specifically about cringey recipes.
You mean people with hobbies? You exclusively want people here without hobbies?
All of your gripes sound like a lack of patience, or a need for the corporate instances of social media to be replicated in the fediverse.
DIY isn’t for everyone. It will have rough edges. It will lack things until you build them.
You want people to go somewhere? Make it worth their time. This is like burning man. Show up to a blank slate and make it fun/interesting/sustainable.
If that’s not for you… well… perhaps you should stop trying to square peg this round hole.
I’m trying to do that, but it’ll take more than one of us. I’m trying to encourage others to join me. Is that a problem?
Six years is not enough time to wait for one other person who thinks suits are cool?
See, you’re saying “corporate instances of social media,” but what you mean is “any other social media that could possibly be perceived as a success.” The fediverse is uniquely lacking in content. It doesn’t need to be corporate for people to come here and make it something.
You ever been on forums? You know what it’s like to not have upload privileges as a user and have to upload everything manually on some pix host?
The fediverse is like that and will most probably stay like that. Why? Cuz space costs money, and people host their own instances.
This fact (having to upload your content on external hosts, rather than just hitting the image upload button and the thing gets uploaded on the instance) coupled with how different the fediverse is and how harder it currently is to find communities you might like, is a no go for most normies. Deal with it 🤷.
Reddit became huge off the back of imgur, only developing its own (asstacular) image upload service in recent years. I haven’t had to upload many photos to kbin yet (it seems to work fine), but I can’t imagine imgur being a problem if I had to use it.
I highly doubt this is part of the problem.
That was true 13+ years ago, when most normies didn’t even have a FB account, let alone a reddit account. Back then reddit was mostly full of geeks, they know how to upload images on pix hosts, that was never a problem for them, and it isn’t now, that’s why we use Lemmy, dispite of it lacking a lot of things that a social media platform in 2023 is most definitely supposed to have. But, we don’t care. Normies care. The don’t like having to switch 10 different apps to upload an image, to have to copy/paste comm URLs in search because your instance still doesn’t federate with the instance with the comm that you’d like to join, they don’t like not being able to follow users (Lemmy still doesn’t support that), they don’t like having 50 different apps that basically do the same thing (which, of course, it’s the whole point of joining an open source network, choice). They want consitency, which is the only thing that the fediverse will never have, and the whole point of even having a fediverse (you don’t like a policy on an instance? fine, move, no one’s stopping you 🤷). When you take away consitency from them, they feel overwhelmed and this thing is just too complicated, end of story.
See, normies were never a part of forums, IRC, BBSes. They’re late internet adopters. They have no idea how things were, that different servers might have different rules, some require SSL, some don’t, others might wan’t you to register the uname with an email, etc. They will never get the defederated aspect of the fediverse. It’s like speaking some alien language to them, it simply does not compute. Corporate centealized media is all they know.
It’s really not that hard to explain. Just tell them it’s like email, they’ll get it.
I swear, most techies think that non-techies are another species. It’s not that hard to explain things, and not everybody is as incompetent as our mothers. Young people understand technology better than old people, not worse, not sure how that part has you confused.
But yeah, being able to post photos directly without going to imgur is easier and more intuitive, I’m glad it seems to be built into kbin without any issue.
You’re talking about people that open up FB accounts with a phone number… they don’t understand the concept of email.
They don’t even understand the concept of phone numbers, they just know they dial and get the other person on the other end, that’s it.
You sure about that? Cuz I’ve had talks with young people that are considered techies amongst their friends, they know a lot less than what techies used to know at that age, which was dissapointing for me. For example, they know that Thor hides their real IP, they don’t know how though. They think it’s somehow magical and that it doesn’t need an IP.
Though I have to admit that I have also met great ones amongst them. The trouble is, they are precious little to be found. And they’re usually the weird kids, not even techies, just pure genious, future coders in most cases. So, no one actually notices them. You’ll hear about them as the guy/gal that invented this or that algo that navigates this or that.
OK, then don’t spend your time here 🤷. I like it. If I don’t like it, I’ll leave. It’s as simple as that 🤷.
By the right audience i don’t mean your everyday Joe, I mean intelectuals, or just people that in general think that there’s nore to life than just sharing family photos on social media, sharing their new boob job or whatever. That is exactly why I don’t like mainstream social media and why I joined Reddit, people made memes there with those kinds or posts/stories… and I was like, finally, my kind of crowd… not just people showing me “oh loooook, doesn’t her nose earing look cute ☺️”, and me silently going “Jenny, I don’t give a f*ck about her nose earing, why in the world would you think I care about that. If I wanted to see it, I would ask.”, but really outloud saying “oh, yeah, so cute ☺️”. Why? Because Jenny just had to share that with me, cuz she knows I have FB/Insta. Now, I don’t have to hear that. Why? Cuz I don’t have neither and she just jumps me when she shares that with everyone. Finally, piece 🙏.
See, people like Jenny and her friend with the nose rings, that for some reason, just felt that she had to share that for the whole world to see, is exactly what I’m trying to get away from here.
Keep your mainstream social media accounts to talk to your friends, use the fediverse for everything else you might think could be a good topic to discuss here. That is what I would do. I actually deleted everything on mainstream social media, except for Reddit and Lemmy. Everything else was just noise to me.
Who said I follow cooking or fashion. I know because my wife does, lol 😂. That’s like every second post on FB and Insta now.
I never said that, but most of the people on mainstream media are like/karma whores or they make money from sharing stupid short clips. I am against them coming here. Sure, they can come and open up shop or whatever, with link to their mainstream social media, hey, it’s OK, but most of them will give up after a short time cuz, well, no one here actually watches those stupid short clips that just show you how to make something very simple, but done in an extremelu complicated way, so you’d go “woooow, so cool 😯”, which mostly works on a brainless audience, which is what most of Meta’s plaforms are filled with, but it won’t work here.
And we do have some thriving hobby communities here, look at c/woodworking, it’s doing great.
Alright, putting aside your elitist bullshit and your complaints about content you’re not seeing because you chose not to see it…
Do you see the difference between Reddit and Lemmy? Reddit has tens of millions of users having intellectual conversations about fashion, clothing, style, etc. across dozens of different subreddits. Some of those conversations are quite pleasant. I’m not going to suggest that you follow them, you’re not into fashion, that’s okay. I’m suggesting that the people who like those things go and talk about those things instead of dwelling on the metaconversations about the fediverse itself.
Once you realize that over 80% of the wolrd’s population are complete idiots, you’ll start seing things differently as well. Why do you think Reddit was at the bottom of the social medias when it came to the number of users? Because it didn’t attract those 80% of the population, that’s why.
OK, then try and convince them to come over here and open up shop. Don’t know what else to tell ya, I’m not forcing anyone to do or not do anything, if someone asks me on which social media I spend most of my time now, I’m not gonna lie, but if they don’t ask what Lemmy or the fediverse is, I’m not gonna start talking about it either. Apparently, they have no interest in knowing more about it, and that’s cool, I respect that. If I wanted to see more of this or that that Lemmy or the fediverse doesn’t have, I’ll just join a social media platform that does, end of story.
Well, I know you’re an idiot, since you seem to struggle with math. If your definition of “complete idiot” includes people in the 75th percentile of overall knowledge, and you don’t see how that makes your definition meaningless and makes you a piece of shit, I can’t imagine why you think anybody would want to chat with you.
I’m here for conversations. There’s no way for me to convince people to come to a social network to not have conversations. Nobody wants that. A very small number of people want to try to build this social network. Those people need to build it, topic by topic, rather than circle-jerking about nothing.
You’re young. I used to think exactly like you. You’ll start seing things more from my point of view as you get older.
OK, make content then. Show them there is content, just no one to talk to.
You want things to happen instantly, they don’t happen like that.
Exactly how young am I, o great omniscient lord on high?
SIX YEARS.
You’re in your 20’s, I can tell that much. Get to your late 30’s, then we’ll talk.
You started using Mastodon when nobody was actually using it. Things will happen in year or two from now. People are finally getting fed up with the nonsence and ads on mainstream social media. That coupled with bad decisions management wise will reduce the actual users on those platforms (bots don’t count). The time of growth is now, not 6 years ago.
Wait, what? Do you want to be on a site where the only topic discussed is the site itself? 100% meta, no content?
Not 100%, memes here and there, NSFW as well, but influencer wannabe types and people sharing family photos and stuff like that, no, thanks, that is not what I signed up for.
The exact reason why I joined Reddit in the first place (and now Lemmy) is to get away from that from places like Insta and FB.
But my post was primarily contrasting Reddit from Lemmy, and Reddit doesn’t have an influencer problem. I didn’t say “we need more influencers,” I said we need people to talk about their hobbies.
This seems extremely elitist, even if just for the fact that you do not know what other knowledge (and experiences and viewpoints and…) those people who’d be interested in those communities would bring.
If you want a site comprised entirely of - what it seems to me - techbros who talk about how large their homelab Kubernetes clusters are, you should do that by curating your experience with the general platform, not by excluding anyone else, which is what you’re doing here even if you don’t realize it.
I personally want people from all walks of life to set up shop in the fediverse (as long as they’re not jerks). Even if I’ll never see or interact with 99% of what they create, maybe that last 1% will solve an obscure problem I encounter, or recommend me something (whether it be a product or recipe or location or…) that will change my life for the better.