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....
Nobody goes to Instagram to talk about Instagram, nobody goes to Tiktok to talk about Tiktok, nobody goes to Facebook (at all).
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 🤷.
The fediverse will never appeal to the masses if we don’t embrace a wide variety of hobbies and interests.
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.
We need people here talking about cooking. We need people here talking about fashion.
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?
Yes, if you go to /m/fashion right now, it’s… barely there.
Apparently, people around here are not interested in that topic 🤷. I’m sure a comm like that would be very popular on Insta.
This is the “content” people are craving.
Once again, the kind of people we’re not trying to attract anyway.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why do you follow it if you don’t want to see it?
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.
You mean people with hobbies? You exclusively want people here without hobbies?
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.
I personally want people from all walks of life to set up shop in the fediverse (as long as they’re not jerks).
But they won’t. Which is fine, I like it that way. They can have their mainstream social media where they share family photos, boob jobs, ass jobs, nose rings, whatever, I get to have this, the fediverse. People that mostly want to talk about those things, they can have mainstream social media.
Alright, putting aside your elitist bullshit and your complaints about content you’re not seeing because you chose not to see it…
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.
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.
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.
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 🤷.
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.
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.
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.
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?
You’re in your 20’s, I can tell that much. Get to your late 30’s, then we’ll talk.
SIX YEARS.
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.
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.
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.
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 confuse.
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.
My mom is afraid of computers, but she understands email just fine.
Really? Then please come over here and try to explain the same to my mom. Cuz I’ve tried it a million times, she doesn’t understand the concept and she doesn’t like to understand at this point, all she knows is, it works, like a phone number, it just works. She doesn’t understand why calling her brother abroad without the country’s calling code doesn’t work, I had to type the number in her phone with the country’s code because she didn’t think that was important and just left the code out… cell operators were also a PITA to explain to her, and I don’t think she got that either, cuz she still asks me what the first 3 numbers in front of the cell are and sometimes I give her bogus codes just to see if she’ll go “don’t screw with me”, but she writes them down and never asks me why is this code different from all of the rest that are in use here… not ever.
So please, don’t tell me everyone understands email, cuz they don’t. I’ll bet you whatever you want that, if you do a street questionare and ask people to explain the concept of email as plainly as possible, over 70% with either get it completely wrong or just shrug and tell they have no idea how it works.
I assume you’re talking about TOR, and not Thor. I consider myself a techie, I’m a patent attorney with a degree in computer science. I’ve read about how TOR works a few times, and probably once new whatever it is you’re getting at, but I couldn’t tell you how the fuck TOR works now. And I couldn’t care less. And I don’t need to understand it to sign up for the fediverse or upload a photo to kbin or upload a photo to imgur.
Yeah, Tor, sorry. Had a nick on a game, Thorazine, everyone called me Thor there, so now it just slips sometimes.
You don’t need to understand any of that, apparently you have a logic streak in you since you have degree in computer science. One, not everyone has that gift, two, even if they did, they might not have developed it, and three, you went to uni. Please tell me the world statistic (percentage) of people that actually went and graduated. I haven’t seen the statistic either, but I bet it’s no more than 15% on a global scale, which about sums my estimate of over 80% of the population not being able to understand simple things (yes, they are simple IMO) like email or federation. It’s not that it’s complicated, it’s the attention span problem. Uni teaches to have long studying session, weeks, months at a time. People that never did that, they just can’t force their brain to concentrate on one single thing for more than 5 minutes at a time, especially not if they’re not getting paid for it and none of their friends use that thing that you’re trying to explain. The very concept of freedom and having the choice to do things your way or how you’d like to be run, escapes them. They just don’t care. They use whatever their friends, coworkers, family use. Why? Cuz why not. Everyone else uses it, it’s simple, you just type in your phone, reset you password (cuz none of them actually remember it, they’re not used to remembering stuff) and off you go to using that app on your new device.
You don’t need to be a software engineer with experience in every field of technology to click a link, sign up for an account, and leave a comment. My mom could do it (if she wanted to, although she’s probably get angry at me if I suggested it and talked to her about it for more than 20 seconds).
You proved my point with the last sentence in brackets. People usually don’t care about techie stuff. Techies do, they love it, but regular people… no. Why would I bother explaining something like the fediverse or email to anyone that doesn’t even wanna hear about that. Has anyone ever asked you (out of the blue) “hey man, you know how that mastodon thing works?”. No… and no one ever will… not unless you start explaining first. No one cares dude, because they’re perfectly OK not knowing about that and just living their lives with coproeate social media. It’s a means to and end for them, they don’t actually care about freedom, they don’t even understand why this is free and the other one isn’t, lol 😂, they’re both free to them, except this one is a hell of a lot more complicated for signing up. “Now I gotta chech my email for a confirmation link, great 😒… shit, can’t remember my password 🤦… aaah, fuck this shit.” See how easy it is for normies to give up. Make the sign up process with a phone number and sign ups will skyrocket, I guarantee you that. But… wait, that’s info that I would rather not share with a social network. Yes, for people like you and me, yes, for normies, it’s just easier 🤷.
You’re just being an elitist misanthrope here. This has nothing to do with the issues facing the fediverse.
You never asked how I know that. The fact that you got fired up and started using curse words says a lot.
You told me I’m too young to know anything, and that you knew better because you were older.
Please quote where I wrote that. I wrote older people are wiser. Not smarted, wiser. Why? Because they have more life experience. Not every older person is wiser, but those that have more than 2 synapses firing up there, usually are.
You just don’t realize how stupid you are.
Once again, trying to make me look bad or get me angry (maybe 🤔) by saying things that I might take as an insult, says a lot.
Nothing has changed in the past six years. We’ve had multiple moments that have felt like… oh wow, people are going to start caring about the fediverse! People are going to come join and it’s going to be a place where people do things! But none of those moments materialized into anything, because a million signups mean nothing if you can’t find anybody to follow, can’t find any followers, can’t find anybody talking about anything but the fediverse, and feel, when you post, that you’re shouting into the wind. You’re not going to post. You’re not going to come back tomorrow. You’re not going to come back in a year. You tried the fediverse, there was nothing there, you went back to the social networks where society resides.
Plase take a look at what has happened this year alone regarding social network platforms and you’ll see I’m right. Reddit’s API changes, Twitter limiting tweet views, Meta launching Threads and deciding to federate that platform with the fediverse. Please point at another year in which so many changes have been made on all social networks worldwide. Trust me, the time is now. If it doesn’t happen now, it’ll most probably never happen.
A million sign ups means a lot. If it means nothing to you, than I guess you’re just expecting for miracles, which is another thing that points to your age. Younger people usually believe in these things, that some sort of a massive global shift will happen in one direction or another. Even for Reddit and Digg that took years and years. Things will move even slower because of the federation aspect of the fediverse. Don’t think 1G users will suddenly shift in 2, 3 months, that is not going to happen. If the whole of the fediverse gets to 1G users in a decade from now, that should be considered a thriumph.
You’re interested in normie subjects/hobbies. That’s fine, no one says you shouldn’t be. Just don’t expect people in the fediverse to be interested in those same things. So, you’re interested in fashion and suits. Those are mostly things that people with no actual preference about the direction in which this world is heading to (in general, not just the internet, social media, etc.). They’re considered superficial. Not saying you are, but people interested in how they physically appear is something that appeals to status, which in turn tells a lot about how those people view the world - through status. Those are not the types of people that will usually care about the direction in which the social media platforms are heading. They usually care about how they appear in society. And that’s fine too. But, they don’t see anything wrong with how social networks work or where things are heading right. For them, things just work and they see no need to switch/change platforms.
You shouldn’t expect to see many posts related to the subjects you’re interested in on the fediverse. Those are usually not things that people who have a higher consciousness and decided to drop the mainstream social media will be interested in. Even if they are, they realize that this place will most probably never be a place where those kinds of interest will thrive, or at least not till corporate social media pose a real threat to the reputation of the fediverse (as is the case with Meta). So, they take their business elsewhere, i.e. to the social networks where these communities thrive. Hey, there’s nothing weong with that, I do it as well, I have no plans to delete my Reddit accounts, they serve a purpose now and will most probably do so in the future. Not use them as frequently, yes, no doubt, the fediverse is now the first thing I open, not Reddit, when it comes to social media that is. But out right completely delete them? I really can’t see a reason, there are still subs there that I know for a fact that won’t switch to the fediverse. Why? They have their reasons, and I get that. I might not agree with it, but I get it. So, no hard feelings, I’ll check up on them from time to time, and that’s about it. My point is, you should do the same and stop asking why years have passed and yet nothing has happened regarding having more people that are interested in this or that on the fediverse. Just deal with it. It probably won’t happen, so I’ll just use mainstream social media, but if it does happen some day, hey, how cool, finally ☺️.
For something to change, we’re going to need to have a conversation people want to join. We’re going to need to build communities that people want to post in, or vote in, or lurk in, or comment in, or share posts from, or talk about, or care about. We can’t just say “there’s no Zuckerberg!” That’s not enough.
Be that change. Start posting on a more a link like aggregator place, like KBin or Lemmy. Mastodon is more of a microblogging thing. From my experience, places more like Reddit sprout meaningful conversations regarding ceratin subjects. So, try and do the same on KBin or Lemmy, see how it goes 🤷.
Plenty of services offer both options because they might as well.
The fediverse will never offer phone numbers as a regustartion option. Why? One, it’s invasion of privacy (something the fediverse is strictly against), and two, it’s a service that costs money, while email is free.
And email really isn’t secure in the first place.
Nobody said it is, it can easily be spoofed. In fact, phone number registration/sign in is far more reliable… but that is invasion of privacy.
But also, there are plenty of services that only offer email signup, and plenty of people use them, and I’ve never really heard of anybody having an issue signing up with email, my mom manages, my sisters manage, my technophobic cousins manage.
Yes, if the services offer “sign in with Google/FB/Twitter”, yes, most people will use that. Ask them if they usually use the last “sign in with email” option and you have your answer… because the other methods I mentioned requires just one click/tap, but not the email option.
But they would never come to the fediverse in the first place, because the fediverse never really had a selling point that mattered to any of them.
It’s best that they don’t in that case.
They want to see their friends, and their friends don’t use it, or see their hobbies, and nobody talks about their hobbies, or see anything that they could possibly care about, and there’s none of that here.
Great, it’s not for them 🤷. Agree to disagree and move on 🤷.
I know plenty of people who signed up for accounts and never posted because there’s nothing to talk about, nobody to engage with.
I beg to differ. There are plenty of subjects that appeal to my interests. It’s just that there are non for most non-tech oriented people. And that’s fine, they have the rest of the social medias for that. Hey, I got a few subs on reddit that will never move here and all of them are tech related. And that’s fine as well, I’ll just visit them from time to time on reddit, don’t get what the big deal is 🤷.
Well, they are… inluding you 🤷… I can’t do anything about it, it’s just how you were raised and (not)educated. If I could, I would help you, but it seems you don’t want help 🤷.
Can we please remember to talk about things on the fediverse besides the fediverse itself? ( kbin.social )
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....