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 @[email protected] 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?
Make it look like a centralised system initially. Provide a portal to a pre vetted/chosen instance that is accepting new members in their locale/country, that is the same for everyone.
Update: This (above) is badly written. I’m trying to say every potential new member gets presented with the same (pretend centralised) portal that is in fact an (valid long-lived) instance local to the individual potential for them to sign up with. So two local users in Oz get given a proxy to the instance local to them, and a user in Blighty an instance local to that person. The decentralised Lemmy looks centralised, but isn’t. The proxy front end should explain that they’re joining their local instance and it’s like a network of little affiliated clubs that can see each others posts globally. they log in for the first time it will become clear.
It’s late, I’m tired, sorry everyone. Is that any better?
I think it’s confusing (the reverse of what they’re used to) for a newbie who have been bought up in a centralised internet with single front ends of all the big players to be presented with little instances to join to access the whole.
Isn’t it like https://kbin.world was back then? (when /kbin was still a thing?)
When you entered that page, it determined your location from IP address and redirected you to a magazine for your country, as shown on kbin.social.
Well, this could be repeated now, but for lemmy instances. We already have umpteen of regional/local ones, and they are on every continent of the world.
I don’t know, I’m not familiar with kbin at all. Good to know I’m not alone in that thinking, though.
It would have helped me. My instance isn’t in the same hemisphere as me!
You can move to a closer one by exporting and importing your settings from the parameters
Thank you for thinking forward. That’s much appreciated.
I’m surprised to find there isn’t much of a delay to loading the data from Oz. I’m sure I remember it being horrific not so long ago.
How hard would it be to create a little quiz that directs or chooses an instance based on your interests?
I think the hard part would be keeping it up to date as instances change
True. I forgot how easily an instance could disappear overnight. Happened to me in another instance