This is a follow-up from my previous thread.
The thread discussed the question of why people tend to choose proprietary microblogging platfroms (i.e. Bluesky or Threads) over the free and open source microblogging platform, Mastodon.
The reasons, summarised by @noodlejetski@lemm.ee are:
- marketing
- not having to pick the instance when registering
- people who have experienced Mastodon’s hermetic culture discouraging others from joining
- algorithms helping discover people and content to follow
- marketing
and I’m saying that as a firm Mastodon user and believer.
Now that we know why people move to proprietary microblogging platforms, we can also produce methods to counter this.
How do we get “normies” to adopt the Fediverse?
Stop addressing them as “normies” would be a great start.
Can’t speak for rest of the Fediverse as I’m not super active on microblogging anymore, but at least here on Lemmy, there is such a strong “in” culture and quirky skewed perception of the world, and often times come off as actively hostile against those that do not share the same quirky skewed world view. The anti-AI, anti-corporate, would rather shoot myself in the foot if it’s not FOSS, etc kind of views, with their own strong vocal proponents, comes off as unwelcoming. People are addicted to socials because of the positivity they can get, not the negative sentiments that’s often echo’ed.
Amongst those that doesn’t share the kind of view, you’d already be looking at an extreme small minority that might be willing to give the platform a try, but as long as the skewed perception of the world dominates the discussions, you can expect them to go back to main stream centralized platforms where they can get more main stream view points based discussions.
Thats the neat part, you don’t. Social medias value isn’t determined by it’s tech. Its value is determined by who and what you can interact with. For example, people wont leave Facebook because everyone they know is on facebook because people won’t leave Facebook. Twitter is literally run by a nazi at this point and still it’s the same story where Mastodon and Bluesky aren’t even close. Same thing for reddit and lemmy. Lemmy simply doesn’t have the content reddit does, look no further than sports subreddits where any given game has a live game thread with a hundred or more unique commentors.
If you want mode people to come here you’re going to need to do two things. One you need to post content people want to see, and two you need to get very very lucky because as it stands if you don’t care enough about decentralization to lose out of a lot of content, theres literally no reason to be here. Its a long slow road and you’re still going to need reddit to do something stupid before we see another growth spike.
if you don’t care enough about decentralization to lose out of a lot of content, theres literally no reason to be here.
Officially supported clients which are not the Reddit app
This was one of the reasons I left, and I assumed most disliked the official app, but weren’t willing to part with the content.
Now, I think I was too close minded. Stuck in my bubble. If it’s not in a discussion about reddit sucking, chances are people don’t care that much.
App sucks? Didn’t think about that, it’s just an app. App really sucks? Whatever, they already use 5 other apps that are worse.
The medium shapes the experience, but isn’t an experience unto itself. Not that important to the average person.
@dch82 first, “normies” have to not get harassed when they come here.
Unfortunately the biggest Fedi software refuses to add automated reporting of offensive posts so if it’s not reported, the admins won’t even see it.
People coming from corporate social media are used to ignoring the report button because in their experience, it either doesn’t work, or gets ignored by admins anyway.
We need automated reporting.
We need automated reporting.
I’m fine with auto REPORTING, but the actual moderation needs to be a human. Auto moderation is bad. It gets things wrong. It’s how I got banned from both twitter (calm down, this was back in 2018 before it was an elon owned nazi cesspool), and reddit.
On twitter I saw a funny video that was posted, and I replied “Aw man, that killed me”.
I was banned for “inciting death threats”
@Lost_My_Mind yeah, just reporting.
I want to do the actual judgement, but if I don’t know the post exists, I can’t judge anything and it makes me so mad that possible racist stuff can exist on my instance without my knowledge because I havent “seen” it.
That’s the thing about automation and training models.
First, they implement some sort of auto-reporting bot that requires a human to review them. In the beginning, it only about 50% accurate, but as they give it more and more examples of good and bad results through the human reviews, it moves to 80%, then 90%, then 99%, then 99.99% accuracy.
After a while, the humans on the other end are so numb to the 9999 entries they have to mark as approved that they can barely tell what’s a rejection themselves, and the moderation team is asking itself just what this human review is actually doing. If it’s 99.99% accurate, why not let the bot decide?
Then, the model moves on from auto-reporting to auto-moderation.
@BeAware@social.beaware.live @dch82@lemmy.zip Maybe im a little lost. Isn’t there a block and report button on Mastodon? I’m using Misskey and both buttons seem to work. I mean im reporting to myself, but the button seems to work. What kind of automated blocking are you trying to do here?
@AterNox @dch82 blocking and reporting work fine.
However, people from corporate social media won’t report posts because in their experience, it either doesn’t get taken seriously or the admins ignore it. Corporate social media sites don’t exactly act on reports in a timely manner.
I’m on my own instance, I moderate for myself. I don’t want slurs to exist on my instance at all. However, if I don’t see them with my own eyes, I cannot ban the user.
PS. I’m talking about banning users that are harassing others on the instance level. These are user actions. I am an admin. I run my own instance.
I’m confused, do you mean like automated enforcement rules/algorithms like big SM has? I.e. if user gets reported for breaking Y rule X amount of times ban user for Z amount of time and forward to admin for further action?
@BeAware@social.beaware.live @dch82@lemmy.zip So Mastodon not have a wordlist you can populate that “removes” posts with the keywords you provide? It took me a while to find it in Misskey, works like a charm,
We have instancewide admin blocks, so the accounts that would be automatically reported can be blocked preemptively, no report needed. That can be both good and bad… but pick a sheltered instance and you shouldn’t get harassed. How would automatic reporting even work? I don’t recall, but doesn’t the admin interface let you specify keywords that alert the admins in a post? Is that what you mean?
Unfortunately not. Mastodon has no such thing. It does have filtered words for normal users. However, that doesn’t do anything besides hide posts that contain the filtered words, nothing more.😬
Definitely. Back when I used FB and Twitter I learned that reporting is entirely useless. You just end up with some automated message about how they reviewed it and it “didn’t violate their community standards” with some lame verbiage like “we realize this isn’t the outcome you were looking for”, regardless of how ridiculously blatant whatever you reported was. On the flip side, I was banned for clearly misinterpreted or brigaded comments, and then an appeal just gives you the inverse where they reviewed it and whatever you posted was definitely terrible and they “realize this isn’t the outcome you were looking for”.
Since most people are talking about the sign-up barriers, I’ll mention culture and reputation.
I love Lemmy and Mastodon, but whenever I’ve seen the fediverse brought up elsewhere, someone inevitably shuts down any curiosity by suggesting that it’s a political echo-chamber. I don’t think that’s accurate for all of it, but if that reputation is out there, we probably need to make an effort to show that there’s a broader appeal. If the average person is expecting the fediverse to be the left-wing equivalent of something like “Truth Social”, I could understand the reluctance to adopt it.
someone inevitably shuts down any curiosity by suggesting that it’s a political echo-chamber
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I think .ml acting as the official or at least de-facto “flagship” instance is doing more harm than good. I’ve seen the same arguments you mentioned, and it always seems to go back to either of the two .ml instances or Hexbear. When political ideology is forced into every interaction, it always seemed it was coming from one of those three.
I’ve shown people Lemmy World as an example that it’s not all political circlejerks, but I don’t know how many of them stuck with it.
Nowadays, I point to show that it’s more than just politics, news and tech
Every social media has the same problem, reddit is on one side, twitter on the other, facebook is filtering by their own goals.
People here are just a bit different angle. But each instance is a little different, lemmy.world is more reddit like, lemmy.ml is leftist, hexbear is… something too, there are probably some right wing instances. Much more diverse than other networks and I enjoy seeing all those different point of views.
This is current problem in society that we don’t tolerate different opinion.
This is current problem in society that we don’t tolerate different opinion.
Exactly this. When online platforms become too homogeneous, any deviation from the typical opinions that are shared seems like a terrible, inexcusable offense that someone must do something about - thus, reinforcing the bubble.
We need to be able to disagree with each other and still get along.
I’m a developer, and it was a pain picking an instance. You start reading about them, and it turns out one’s censored, the other one’s communist, third one doesn’t cooperate with the other ones so you can’t see anything…
As long as it is like this, I don’t believe mass adoption is feasible. I would’ve given up because it takes a lot of time compared to just registering and off you go, but I was interested to see what’s all the ruckus after reddit started with censorship. Maybe interesting to mention that I was never an active reddit member (not one post there).
Indeed, nowadays I just send people to Lemm.ee
- neutral name (sorry SJW)
- second biggest instance
- almost no defederation
- no topic or country specific (I mean, technically Estonia, but everything happens in English, compared to feddit.org for instance)
Just send them to Lemmy world
I agree that having a “default instance” would greatly help with onboarding new users, but as many others have said before, centralizing on the largest instance is not a good idea.
There are several other “general purpose” Lemmy instances. Why not send everyone to lemm.ee, until its size is close to lemmy world? At that point, start sending everyone to lemmy.sdf.org or lemmy.zip.
Yea, instead of a default instance, I think there should be a default system that assigns you to one of a set of participating “general” instances without you having to decide or think about it.
And then we will get more communities being created on Lemmy world, and then the whole Fediverse depends on one single instance. This seems like a good idea at first, but won’t stand the test of time.
I am trying to convince more instance admins to install Fediverser on their servers, so that we can have a way to point people to one site that can distribute the users and help with onboarding and discovery. But so far none of the admins really seem to be interested in the having to deal with the potential influx of users from Reddit.
I am trying to convince more instance admins to install Fediverser on their servers, so that we can have a way to point people to one site that can distribute the users and help with onboarding and discovery
What does Fediverser from an admin standpoint? Does it just enable a “Login with Reddit” option for onboarding new users?
How do we get “normies” to adopt the Fediverse?
We don’t. Normies take one look at anything that isn’t mainstream and pinch their noses. A significant portion of them can barely make a search on the internet, they get lost at the idea of “websites” and are likely heavily biased against people who aren’t using what “everyone is using”
Anedoctal experience: back when I was using dating apps, I’ve had a fair share of girls that stopped talking to me once I said I didn’t have instagram, because it meant I was “hiding something”.
That may be true for some people, but isn’t a valid generalization. See the Brazil blocking Twitter situation.
Millions decided to give Bluesky a chance and a graph showed daily user activity quadrupling. Now, a not-insignificant portion are saying they refuse to return to Twitter because:
- It feels less toxic and healthier
- They have more control over their experience
- They’re finally having fun with social media again
Sound familiar?
And I’m pretty sure Misskey has more features. Hell, Mastodon as well probably. Bluesky doesn’t even support video yet.
The first sin of the Fediverse isn’t being small, that’s the second. First is being a pain in the ass.
The migration that happened from xitter being blocked in Brazil is a good example of a bandwagon effect, or “people go where people are”. If xitter wasn’t taken down, neither bluesky nor threads would’ve received such a big and immediate influx.
Also worth noting is that the vast majority went for those 2, bluesky more so than threads, instead of any mastodon instance because those 2 are the mainstream alternatives
Yes, people chase content, which means chasing where many people are, but why did Bluesky become a mainstream alternative and Mastodon didn’t?
I’m saying marketing doesn’t cut it, and it’s not just about where most users are either, otherwise everyone but Threads would be irrelevant.
People bounce off both Threads and Mastodon, and there are platform-related reasons for that.
