At the end of the day, you can’t solve socioeconomic and political problems with an app. The monopolization of social media is an inherently political problem, and ultimately the only solutions are political in nature. Centralized platforms like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube wield immense power over the way we communicate, and that power is not something that will be surrendered willingly. One might hope that market forces would spur competition, but the past couple decades of tech industry history has only indicated a tendency towards consolidation. Every “promising” upstart company like YouTube, WhatsApp, Twitch, GitHub etc. ultimately succumbs to the Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Amazon blob.

Fediverse platforms like Lemmy, Mastodon, Peertube, Matrix, etc. are great technology. They are the future of the Internet - or at least, they deserve to be. The problem is, the technical details of federation and the implications of software licensing tend to get lost on the vast majority of people who aren’t either software engineers or activists. Most people don’t seem to care about privacy as long as they can get their memes and talk to grandma. As a pathological Free Software nerd myself, I’d talk to friends and family about how awful Facebook is for years and they’d literally reply “if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.”

I’ve been praying for a long time for decentralized, Free Software social media to take off. I remember the snazzy videos and Kickstarter campaign that launched the Diaspora network ten years ago. I was crushed when it made virtually no inroads into the Facebook monopoly.

The trend as it appears to me is that alternative social media platforms tend to grow the quickest when the monopoly platforms produce exile communities. Mastodon grew to millions of users out of dissatisfaction about the way Twitter was being operated (and then Gab is another story). Platforms like Raddle, Voat, Tildes, Lemmy, Hexbear, and TD.win (ugh) have grown either due to the fact that they were expelled from Reddit, or were so sick of the direction Reddit was heading in they decided to strike it out on their own.

At the end of the day, software is just a tool. Federated social networking is among the most promising tools in the box because federation appears to be the only plausible mechanism to overcoming the network effect, but it is still just a tool. The adoption of federated social networking platforms will be driven primarily by social forces, and I think the best way for us to promote the use of federated social media is to facilitate this process whenever push comes to shove.

I think a major hurdle is that those centralized services have the EASIEST sign up process and the EASIEST find things to follow so that the feed isnt dead or filled with junk. Most processes use phone numbers to find IRL friends, and gather some of the biggest names in various catagories to toss at someone and say “yo, here’s some shit to follow”.

Can this hurdle be overcome? I think so, as long as there is a committed and active group of people. First, have multiple people host “first-stop” servers for newcomers. This helps to promote the federated method while also making it easy to join without thinking deeply about it. I know there already is a list of servers to join, but when someone is just starting off, it should automatically populate so they don’t even see it. There can be an option for someone who understands federation to select their server, but if we are reaching a non-tech audience, we have to understand some people are just not going to care.

Second, the feed. Now, the local/federated timeline is a feed, but the personal feed needs to be worked on too. We need accounts that retoot a lot, have a variety of topics, and some that talk about how mastodon works. I can think of a few already. Now I know that we wanna move away from the like culture, so have these accounts be handled by a group instead of a user only.

Third, make it easy to switch servers or host their own instance. We would hope to move a majority of people off the “first-comer” server. This is a small dev projrct and a major community project since the biggest hurdle there is that people don’t wanna pay for hosting or learn how to self-host. Some good projects that mostly manage hosting like Yunohost so its just convincing people that its a good thing.

This is just off the top of my head but I love this discussion happening. Following closely

@Gwynne@lemmy.ml as the mod in this community is inactive, and you are posting a lot of good threads and comments, would you like to be a mod here?

Lemmy is the only fediverse community that works ideally as a “replacement” for reddit through the inherent nature of reddit itself. Mastodon, Pixelfed, Diaspora, Friendica, peertube, Matrix, etc. None of these live up to the requirement to work as a replacement for their respective community.

One of the major problems, i find, is that people actually want some level of spam coming their way, and to spam others. i.e. every artist knows that Twitter is the place to spread your art - and unfortunately, it cannot be done on Mastodon. Mastodon lacks both the community, and the features to highlight art and spread said art to its fans and viewers. Because of the lack of tools to get to your base on the fediverse (for privacy reasons), many people simply cannot jump to the platform without losing the ability to maintain their spread (and income), or the utility they need, in order to continue operating their communities. This is not to mention the problematic nature of how people use things. i.e. Facebook has an atrocious “forum” platform they call “groups”, people hate it, but they still opt to use Facebook’s groups rather than a proper forum or a reddit/lemmy sub for their community; and this is because they’re already on facebook as it is, because everything is on facebook, chat, group interests, shopping, business sites, business support chats, relevant ads, local and otherwise - everything is just there, and people will always take the path of least resistance even if it sort-of sucks (and believe me, i hate it more than most, as i work with facebooks tools daily, and it kills me a bit inside each and every day for how poorly everything works, there is a myriad of bugs, no support from facebook themselves, and half the time things are just down, for weeks at a time, i finally setup my own booking system because the facebook booking system has barely worked all last year - and sadly, leaving facebook for booking means i’ve lost about 20% of my clients).

Another huge hurdle is to compete with the big names when they have so much money to blow on things that we simply can’t. i.e. facebook is huge in third world nations and essentially “the internet”, because of privatized ISPs. people can’t afford to pay for internet, and because of that facebook has carved a very fine anti-competitive hole for themselves; because, even if you can’t afford to pay for internet, you can still browse facebook; as they pay the ISPs to allow people access to facebook for free despite not paying for an internet connection - meaning that people literally use facebook as the internet, finding businesses and tech support, information, share, communicating, hobby communities, calling, chatting, shopping, news, everything and anything. how do you compete with that? you can’t, not unless the fediverse somehow had the funds to pay these ISPs free access to the fediverse. and this sadly also means that as long as facebook maintains this massive userbase, facebook is here to stay.

Matrix is another “almost there, but not really”. It’s a fantastic platform, and it has gotten so very far since its inception, but it has too many bugs for public adoption (users except their platform of choice to ‘just work’), and still lacks essential features necessary to compete with Discord/Slack such as hotjoin voice chat, “servers” with “channels” (i know it tried to solve this, but their solution to it sucks), large-scale video conference (they sort-of do this, i guess - but it’s far from where it needs to be), and enterprise tools for administration, communication and organizing utility.

Bottom line, if the fediverse wants to succeed, it needs to focus on the tools necessary for communities to maintain a coherent environment. To focus on tools allowing creators to spread their creations. To focus on tools allowing business operations to spread their crap. To focus on tools allowing users to maintain a structured community of interest. And to some how afford to be free without an internet subscription.

Focus local, not global. Get your friends, family and other locals to join the fediverse. Make it relevant in your community. Comprehend why your peers benefit from the fediverse and create rhetorics that can convince them. Make the process of giving it a shot as easy as possible. Dont trust that they are going to figure it out themselves. People might like the idea of the fediverse, but they have a life to deal with as well.