Honestly, most people are followers. If you have a few high profile celebrities publicly announce they are switching over, I'm sure their fan base will do the same. Once the fans go over, then the friends of fans follow and so on.
Yeah, that's probably the best way that people would move across. Knowing people are moving across to Threads, It could be a good way (once they join the Fediverse) for people to get involved with it and maybe move across to things like Mastodon and Lemmy.
As an idiot currently blundering around in it, I don't think this is something we can gatekeep, nor can we try and do it. It's just something that will happen
The great thing about the fediverse is that people have control over which instances they are around, and there will always be some more isolated ones if that's what you prefer
But we can, or not, encourage it. I'd rather not. I've never - not even once in more than 30 years online - seen a forum get notably popular without it also, and obviously as a direct result, going to shit.
The great thing about the fediverse is that people have control over which instances they are around, and there will always be some more isolated ones if that’s what you prefer.
If the masses discover the fediverse and move here, that's not going to remain the case, guaranteed.
They'll bitch and moan because content isn't centralized (we've already seen that), and the rent-seeking fuckwads will, one way or another, rearrange things so that it is centralized, and specifically so that they can then squat on top of it and suck profit out of it, and it'll end up just another facebook/twitter/instagram/reddit.
A lot of those people would need to go to there own instances that we would be able to block due to policies on most mastodon instances aligning with Trans Rights as well as other LGBT+ people being safe.
More content. More diverse content. And more diverse users.
There really isn't a lot of posts. A significant portion of posts are from bots. Similarly, there aren't many comments.
It feels like most content is doomer news, politics, Linux, Star Trek, programming, or gaming related. And that's my jam. But it gets old after a while.
And of course it would help to have more diverse users. I know we aren't all the same, but Lemmy has a lot of software developers and left leaning folks with post secondary degrees.
Yeah, I get what you mean. It would be good to get more niche communities involved. It's good to see like-minded people, but it's always good for someone to have another opinion that can back up their views with facts.
People are "lazy" and only social, today. They want to log in, info dump, and not think.
Before the nadir of social media, when reddit and twitter were coming up, the people online were predominantly young millennials and new tech was exciting. That was a time where netizens were more curious and accepting of online platform learning challenges. In fact, if it was beta or even just more hands on and generally nerdy, that often made the platform more appealing. Then everything became standardized. Mega social media squashed innovative smaller fun projects. Competition got absorbed. And with the mass standardization of the internet came the younger generations who came up just expecting shit to work as they've always seen. Streamlined and with an inclusion of 15 minutes of fame. But, in honesty the biggest snooze is the lack of innovation that drove the old internet drives today's general malaise.
Times are different. People are bored with internet tech and are therefore less curious. My younget gen z and y co-workers glaze over if I even so much as mention irc or playing around with your own web server. Gen y understands but doesn't care because Twitter and IG governed their highschool experience. Gen z doesn't understand and are kinda boomer-esque in terms of any software comprehension. I've had to teach my interns what Excel even is.
Times are different. Everything has being standardized, monontonized, monitized, predictable, and generally boring. I think the fediverse would have to become mainstream to appeal to the mainstream. And today's mainstream aren't interested in new platform learning curves unless there's something fun, compelling, and of entertainment value to them.
Irc is probably a nice way to see how chatting was back in the 90s im a gen z and i think its quite fun to just load up a irc client then log on to random irc servers to have some fun
I'm gen z :[ ouch. To be fair though yeah, not that many gen z actually have digital literacy. I need to help my friends the same age as me with things boomers would also ask me for help with. It's kind of sad having a very surface-level consumer relationship with the wonderful world of the internet and tech
Yea... and I realize how harsh it sounds but like, I put "lazy" in quotes because I don't think it's really laziness. Maybe more boredom? The environments' just been designed to not invite exploration. Everything is just automatic and instant now. Innovation is driven by need. The need has been engineered away, for the most part.
Gen z here, there are still nerds in our generation
Think part of what you're seeing might be that previously when it was all new and niche the only people using these sites were nerds, nowadays everyone's using it so by comparison it looks like there are less of us around
I hear Lemmy is very reminiscent of the old internet because it aggregates all the techies together like the internet in general used to
I'm in that demographic (born in the 90s), and my friends are definitely apathetic/uninterested in trying new platforms. I am trying to convince them of alternatives 🫡, wish me luck.
I didn't even know Lemmy existed until last week (when I specifically searched for a Reddit alternative) even though I heard about Mastodon.
And it might be confusing to decide where you need to register and what's the difference without reading up how the Fediverse works. Most people don't care about that.
Also if they are based on the same technology why I can't use a Mastodon account to login/interact with Lemmy (conveniently)
I guess if we ever have Nomadic identities most of the above could be solved? Except that Lemmy is still almost completely unknown for most of the people.
For me it was a combination of seeing that there was a lot of activity on the fediverse (no point joining a social media if there's no people on it) and also feeling the need to actually frequently use social media again, because I hadn't been using social media for a while outside of retweeting something once in a blue moon.
We're social creatures, so I'm sure the more people move to Fediverse, well, the more people will follow.
Yes, ActivityPub 2.0 is working on that from what I can see. It would be really cool to see how that turns out. Bluesky's not using the same protocols though, so unsure how they are going to fix with all of that.
not even "still on facebook", since 2020, the surge of people moving TO facebook instead of away of facebook has increased tremendously.
the traditional second hand market sites are dying because facebook marketplace is taking over.
traditional websites and helpdesk/support channels are dying because companies are switching to facebook pages and messenger/whatsapp.
old school forums have more or less been entirely replaced by facebook groups.
alternative chat platforms have more or less died because of messenger.
branding is nearly gone everywhere and has been replaced by instagram.
the list goes on.
and imo the worst part is, facebooks policy and technical offering is inferior to the alternatives people are moving away from. and the only reason everyone is moving to facebook is because everyone is moving to facebook.
--
the day Mastodon offers Groups, I will be advertising the move to Mastodon and shortly shut down the groups I run. Though, Groups was supposed to be out already last year and yet we're in 2024 and nothing is happening. If they had managed to stick to schedule it would have been a golden opportunity because a lot of people were looking for alternatives (but found none), when facebook went ham on their policy. but as there was no alternatives, everyone's back on facebook just circumventing the policies (for now).
The Fediverse if a complicated concept, that looses a lot of the appeal that Twitter/Reddit has, we need more coordination between instances, and less of a scattershot approach to communities. This obviously goes against the goals of the Fediverse where you want several similar communities on different instances to make the system far more robust.
Then we need a killer community, a community that people has to have, that only really work on Lemmy, and not on Reddit.
Mastodon mostly just needs more users, especially celeberties, then users would come.
I read something about ActivityPub 2.0 being pushed for more feedback from the developers of Instances talking, so hopefully that brings more talk and direction between instances.
Lemmy would be amazing if it had some unique communities that people have been looking for, for years on Reddit. It could be a way to get Lemmy to grow.
I know there is crossover between places like Mastodon and Lemmy as at the moment I'm using Mastodon to talk to everyone on Lemmy but certainly could be improved.
Lemmy overall feels like old reddit when it was still run and filled by people who cared. Names are familiar, everyone rather(in some places) chill, and the server is on fire half the time. I forgotten what it was like to start to know people online. Reddit is too big to ever learn a name again unless its a "human" on the front page again. It's kinda nostalgic.
Yeah it would just be nice to have some more niche communities being run. Maybe I should help start those niche communities or something but I’m not really using Lemmy anymore but still love browsing the content
More diverse content and a better attitude to bringing on new people who would contribute to the community. I like it here but I do see a lot of slagging off the people still on Reddit, users of other social media sites, and even other instances. I am one of those people, I still use Instagram (I like to watch cat videos and people making weird music) and occasionally Twitter (for breaking news and storm chaser stuff), and sometimes it's a little disparaging to read lots of comments saying people like me don't belong here.
It is entirely up to you; every set of eyes that reads this.
Every post, every community you participate within, every upvote, every positive interaction is helping this place grow. All we need to do is make a place people want to visit; add value to their and our own lives.
I moderate !3dprinting and a couple of others that are not active. I'm at 179 posts and 1485+1 comments. I'm here a few times at least on most days.
I try and post in as many other communities as I can and be as positive an influence as I can manage.
The best thing you can do is upvote and participate in absolutely every little niche you can possibly participate in. I'm a jack of all trades master of none, but I'll even go outside of my comfort zone to try and support everything I can. I don't just take from this place, I want to build it, to grow with it, to be a part of it. I am the fediverse. You are the fediverse. It is what you make of it.
I posted this when there were less than 5k active users on Lemmy and .world was a couple of weeks old: https://lemmy.world/post/36032
Yes I’ll stay active in as many places as I can on here especially when I know a topic. Even better now I’ve worked out a way to interact with people on Lemmy through Mastodon
People who have been paying attention have already moved. Anyone who's left will need a missile dropped directly on top of their head by Elon Musk or Steve Huffman personally. They will leave when the websites can no longer support themselves and shut down their servers, forcing the users out.
Yeah, tbh with all of what has happened on both of platforms, it's sad to still see them alive.
Hopefully, people slowly start moving across or they're some huge outage that happens in the future as it doesn't seem like many more people are willing to move across (at least from my experience).
Who knows, Threads may help the future of the Fediverse with the amount of users that could see the possibility of it across Mastodon, Lemmy and many other instances.
I occasionally go back to reddit for niche communities and for looking up some user generated information/answers. I think the niche community might not easily be solved until more people move to lemmy, but as for the information lookup, if we can port the more useful stuff from reddit I don't think I'd have much of a reason to go back to reddit (seriously, so much of the newer info in some subs are factually wrong but no one seems to care and it just seems to get worse the longer time progresses). The main issue is how to figure out what is the useful stuff. Idk about Twitter, haven't used them in years.
I would like to see the Fediverse grow overtime, also we haven't had to deal with a Decentralised network across the internet before, who knows what may happen.
There is a big difference between slow growth over time though (say a few percent of the existing user base every month) and a giant influx of new users (say 10 times the existing user base in a single month). The latter destroys everything the community was about since nobody knows the unwritten rules and new users copy bad behaviour from other new users.
we haven't had to deal with a Decentralised network across the internet before
You say that while using the WWW, a decentralized network of Webservers and Webbrowsers all Access the world.
And you say that while using Domain names, which certainly don't come from your /etc/Hosts but from a decentralized DNS Network of servers all around the world.
That's different from a Protocol that anyone can use, boot up a server that has access to the whole Fediverse active posts & user base.
The Fediverse is making it so much easier for people to have users across their own social network platforms, bending the protocols to work with what vision they have, well still allowing others to access it.
Twitter is a celebrities' and public persons' playground. As well as organisations. Anyone else is on there either to gain prominence or to follow the prominent accounts. Until there's a suitable fediverse platform that appears as an advantage to those big names, nothing's gonna change on that front. In spite of all the censorship and cancellations.
Would it be best for Bluesky to then take all the celebs & public figures and work out a bridge between protocols, making it hopefully possible to see their stuff on Mastodon and other places?
As users can then choose if they want to use Mastodon or another alternative like Bluesky.
I'm not familiar with Bluesky so I don't know the answer to that. But I don't think any entity can just 'take all the celebs & public figures'. They are unlikely to move unless they think it's an advantage to themselves or their organisation.
There's plenty of Celebs & public figures using Bluesky, as that's how they started growing their platform originally.
There's also Threads that have more Celebs & public figures including Bill Gates. So I guess Threads might be the way they will publicly get in on the Fediverse. That's when they actually fully flesh their ActivityPub stuff and publicly release it.
Yeah, well, at least it's said to have that many active users but logging in once in a month to check 1 post. So less than 10 seconds on the website / app counts as active.
I'm sure it's slightly inflated. Hopefully indie developers and other smaller public figures come across.
good point, but how active are those 2 Million users on Bluesky counted?
Even the daily active user count is said to be 2 orders of magnitude more than Bluesky. That's a lot of people with a very wide range of interests, political leanings and priorities. Most of them have never heard of federated networks and won't be interested unless their favourite celebrity, jounalist, politician or you name it moves to a platform that just so happens to be federated. By all means, build bridges, but I don't have the solutions.
Someone should make a comprehensive, easy to follow guide to Lemmy with the latest info and apps, and share it to Reddit including their r/lemmy. Same with Mastodon.
I've sworn off of Reddit unfortunately so I'm not going to post, but maybe if I make something I can ask someone to share it there for me?
Having a guide to the Fediverse (at least Mastodon & Lemmy) could bring the people who are looking for alternatives to possibly see it and read about how you can easily join, which is a really good idea.
Yeah people like that would help greatly even if it’s just for the Reddit like experience they used to get where users can just post to you as a creator
User interface.
OK miss/calc/shark key has it but mastodon is pretty rough, and lemmy isn't that nice. Yes I know for Lemmy Alexandrite is neater than the official app, but it's already some power user level, same for instances having the photon and old front-end.
I think we just wait, if it's meant to be it'll happen organically
Besides, do we really want to bring the entire internet in here? Not sure what reason we have for it and at the moment it's full of like minded nerds, which is just how I like it personally
That said it could probably do with a wider spectrum of political beliefs, it does feel like a bit of an echo chamber sometimes
Currently no, but protocols and things are being worked on including one by the PixelFed creator called Sup!. Maybe one day we will have a good messaging system between the fediverse.
The easiest thing to use what isn’t decentralised but is secure would be Signal for the moment. Especially as they rolled out usernames instead of using your phone number
I don't think it's going to happen over any single event. I think Federated platforms will remain small scale but very active, and that's all they have to do as mainstream social medias spring up, monetize, and collapse, over and over and over again.
Then one day in the future, the latest generation of cool kids will just realize that it's way cooler to be on the Federated platforms than it is to be on the mainstream sites.
I wouldn't say it would take more than 20 years. People are already annoyed with how much social media they have to move between, as well as the data collecting and adverts they get.
It's that or if some of these bigger creators, stars or business' move across to the Fediverse as their way of communication, then that would increase the user base.
I know people that use Reddit & Twitter purely for their NSFW content, So I don't think taking away Fediverse NSFW content would work for those types of people.