Yeah, and that’s really the crux of it. To 90% of people, the content is all that matters. That’s why comments like: “hey, you like TikTok? Why don’t you try Loops instead?” or “Check out Pixelfed, it’s a bit like Instagram!” are unlikely to work. For most people, it’s just a strictly worse version. The same thing but without the content. Why would they downgrade for no reason?

You have to care about something external to the core experience of consuming content to actually be here. That’s why our population at the moment is, well, just us here *gestures around.* You have to care about FOSS, or decentralisation, or anti-corporatism, or really value the more human interactions you get in a smaller setting with fewer bots, or actually enjoy putting in more work and get less served to you by an algorithm.

Most of the people with those values I believe will eventually trickle over here naturally. The rest though, this is a really hard sell for.

This is exactly why corporations/governments want to keep them tired and not caring. That’s how they get them to stay on large social media platforms where they can send millions of bots to shift the vote their way through propaganda, and it never ends, never gets better. It’s a dream for an authoritarian who thinks everything big brother did in 1984 was the best idea ever.

And to your point, the people keep having those problems because they are giving every shred of their money and data to massive corporations without a minuscule thought of how it affects other people. It’s a downward spiral from there.

Location being constantly tracked because you use google services turns into tracking where you shop turns into tracking your buying habits turns into…hey, we can charge this fool even more for the product they’re buying, and they’ll keep buying it! Even better we can create 56 fake brands all within a few cents differing price of each other so no one knows what product is actually good, and make millions of bot reviews so those aren’t reliable either!

All because people can’t be bothered to just think about who they are giving their data to.

Yeah, the Fediverse needs different ways to promote itself. Very few people give a flying flip about decentralization or open source, but some people might be interested in:

-Giving less power to Sam Altman (partial owner of Reddit), Zuck, Musk et. al

-Not having everything you post directly given to OpenAI for AI training

-Lack of psychologically manipulative algorithms

-Fewer ads

-Different moderation, maybe (if someone has had issues with being threatened on Xitter or having posts auto-removed somewhere or something)

-More human interactions

You’re still not going to get most people to move over based on those things, but you might get more.

That’s why when I tell people about MULTIVERSE, I tell them it doesn’t have ads, and the devs ain’t using your data to rig the US presidential election.

That’s what normal people care about.

It absolutely is, and it’s harder than it seems.

Content curation and the “discovery problem” (which includes the algorithms of how we deliver search, feeds, recommendations, related content, news, current events, and more) of how people discover new-to-them content is a genuine and important problem. In fact, I believe it’s so important that even the people who acknowledge it as a serious problem in places like the fediverse and the open web are generally underestimating how fundamentally important and challenging it actually is. It’s a foundational and crucial prerequisite for any sort of information sharing and that gives it so much more significance that I think people struggle to actually follow how its ripples turn into waves. And it’s a very hard one to solve, unfortunately.

(Editor’s note: I begin descending into meandering philosophical nonsense beyond this point, proceed at your own risk.)

Without tackling that problem, which is still a largely unsolved problem at scale, and preferably doing so honestly (unlike the manipulative big tech engagement-farming, advertisement-selling “solutions” to this problem) we’re always going to end up building disparate and disconnected silos of information that most people will never gain access to. And we all suffer because of that. We have come so close to tapping into the collective and cumulative knowledge that humanity and civilization has built up to this point, and now we are fighting against something similar to the last-mile problem of how do we actually enable all humanity to access and build on it. This requires both access and education, and it’s hugely challenging, massively widespread and most of the time people can’t even see the forest for the trees when it comes to this. We are on the verge of something genuinely transformative for civilization, and unlike the hype it’s not all doomsday scenarios about AI taking over and killing all humans, it’s about finding ways of giving real humans direct or indirect access to the overwhelming library of information that other humans have spent millennia building into a globe-spanning technological empire. That’s the transformative part.

It’s not about the success of companies or nations, it’s about how effective we are at giving information to other humans, it’s always been about that. The myth of Prometheus is sort of misleading. The person who actually changed the course of humanity’s future isn’t the one who first learned about fire (or any other tool we’ve learned to use), nor the one who discovered how to reliably create or use fire. In fact, there were probably many, many such people throughout humanity’s history, but they either died with the knowledge or kept it secret and hidden until it died out again after a few generations when they refused to share it and others became jealous or threatened by it. They achieved little. The person who actually changed humanity’s future is the person who, with that information, decided to teach it openly to someone else, not as magic or as a secret, but as something they could understand, something that became part of cultural practices, oral traditions, recorded histories, got turned into tools and equipment or some other form of institutionalized knowledge, something that people could then re-use and teach to the people who came after them, and let it spread from there to more and more people. Everything we have ever built is built entirely on top of education, teaching, documenting, and sharing information with others and thus with future generations and sustaining the information, building systems like language and writing to sustain that information further. Whenever that information comes to a dead end, it is lost, sometimes forever, and that’s not a cautionary tale, that can happen, it does happen, it has happened. Even recently. Our success and progress is measured by our ability to transfer our knowledge, not by the knowledge we have at any given moment. Dumping our collective creativity and thoughts and independent research into an unsearchable, disorganized pile to be archived, forgotten and lost serves no-one. But how do we share it with others? How do we distill it so that the endless firehose of what’s available still provides the information we need but doesn’t hit us with brutal, overwhelming amounts of it? That’s the fundamental question.

I hope not. Surely we can come up with other ways to help people easily find stuff they like.

I’d say so, yeah. Either implement algorithms and deal with the consequences or design something that would make discovery of new content as easy as seeing it appear in your algorithmic feed, while avoiding all the problems that personalization brings.

Honestly, the lack of a decent algorithm is why I stopped using Mastodon. It’s not a problem on lemmy since up- and downvotes are the algorithm, but for all other fediverse services it’s what keeps me away.

The difference is that this doesn’t mean I’m on Insta or Twitter, just that this here is basically all social-media I do.

It’s like with Linux, just get new friends.

What’s crazy to me is that the barrier to entry is lower on the fediverse in my experience

Note the word “entry.” The likelihood that someone doesn’t already have an account on Twt/Insta/FB/etc. and is making an account on the Fediverse has got to be near zeroo. No one is ever gonna hear about the Fediverse first before other major social media platforms unless they’re a literal child who is getting their first ever account.

So yes, while making a second acc on social media platforms is a major pain-in-the-ass, most people already have their account + app and don’t have to deal with that shit.

Same. I had my new Bsky account suspended for using a VPN during the registration. I sent an email to their tech support explaining the situation. No response, account was never recovered.

I guess I’m not welcome on their platform lol.

Yeah, Lemmy/Fediverse has a very specific brand of niche and very few others. I’m missing those book/media-related communities here too. Fedi needs more niches.

Maybe don’t explain the Fediverse. If they dislike AI, just say you use a Reddit alternative that isn’t partially owned by Sam Altman. If they’re concerned about being addicted to Instagram, say you use an Instagram alternative without the addictive algorithms.

Its a good idea overall but i cant even explain what a fediverse is

Don’t even try to explain what the fediverse is. At best, note it’s something like “the old forums from the 90s” or “some communities that affiliate with each other”. They can get the broader understanding by experience and experimentation later, if they dare, and it’s going to be a far more intuitive understanding than if we try to essay upon them.