So I am a big fan of the Fediverse, I love the idea of decentralisation and I believe this is how the future of social media should be. But here starts the problem.
All my friends are using Instagram or TikTok or else. I didnt think of that while I also used Instagram, but I think they are highly addicted. Its not possible for them to not use Instagram for at least 1h when we meet up. When I still used Instagram, I was part of the problem. But now that I left it a couple of months ago, I just realised the problem I used to live in.
Addiction is all about realising you are addicted, but I find it very hard to address the problem. I dont want to harm our friendship over social media and I am afraid that when I tell them about their addiction, they will not agree and find it impolite.
So I believe that social media can only survive if the people use it. Its all about user generated content and while the Fediverse is doing better than ever, it still needs more users ASAP.
How can we achieve getting those people on the Fediverse and, more importantly, hold them here, while they slowly get less addicted to social media and see the potential of the Fediverse.
Thank you for reading and for thinking about possible answers. I wrote the whole text by myself, this is not AI generated.
I just pointed them over to mastodon.social, pixelfed, and some others. Andvi dont tell them its fediverse, its just another site that anyone can spin up. They can dig if they want to. One out of 4 initially stay. Some come back.
What helps is friends and family on the platform.
There's a bit of an issue with that. Re-Centralization. If the grand majority of users are in the "Main" or "Primary" instance, it's just moving one mass from one to another, without spread... The original problem the fediverse had (around twitter acquisition) was discoverability, I am not sure how much of an issue that might be yet, but it would affect how people across the verse find new things. Lemmy is one of those that thankfully, "just works", but the Friendica instance where I am seems to prioritize geographically local-first and barely anything else, unless specified... That could be a Friendica-specific issue though... Maybe Mastodon fairs better in this regard.
There's also a small solution I can think of for this... Does the Fediverse have an equivalent to
matrix.to? Matrix.to (and instances of it) just redirects whatever client to whatever room on whatever homeserver. I personally think it'd be nice, if we have something similar, so that artists and vendors and similar, could, in theory, have a one-link to them, and have that also be a QR Code for them on their business cards too. -- I do apologize if this sounds corporate, but from where I'm from, if you wanna catch up on events on follow a new artist you, typically they use QR Codes.https://redirect.piefed.social/ takes you to your nearest PieFed instance.
I think we are too small to care about something like this. I can see a "bad" instance taking people off forever. But it would be nice to have for certain to have more people spread out.
Two thoughts based on what you wrote:
I think it's plenty fine to recommend a specific instance to people. It doesn't need to be the main one either, it can even be yours:
Not really. Probably because Matrix can "get away with" recommending some default software (including web apps) to view a community from any server, regardless of where it is, mostly because there's very few instances of that software to recommend. Matrix.to is a first-class service provided by the same people who run the flagship Element client and develop the server too, after all. And it's still limited: matrix.to will not point you towards a niche instance of Element, for example.
But things get worse when it comes to Mastodon and Lemmy because usually instances tend to act as both data servers and clients. If somebody sends their profile link to a friend, it goes to their server. People have implemented sharing techniques, but these are janky at best, and require extra configuration and pre-knowledge on the part of the recipient.
And I still don't know how to open a post from a different Lemmy instance on my current one without manually looking for the community and then the post.