Having spent a lot of time on Mastodon… There are tons of people there talking about federated and self-hosted services, software freedom, censorship, encryption, tech regulation… A very narrow range of topics directly surrounding the fediverse get a lot of attention.
But nobody talks about anything else. Nobody goes to Instagram to talk about Instagram, nobody goes to Tiktok to talk about Tiktok, nobody goes to Facebook (at all). People use social media to either talk to their friends or talk about their hobbies and interests.
And if your hobby is tech, that’s fine, enjoy. I like tech too. But please, if you have anything else to say, say it. The fediverse will never appeal to the masses if we don’t embrace a wide variety of hobbies and interests.
We need people here talking about cooking. We need people here talking about fashion. We need people here talking about immigration policy. We need people here talking about everything people enjoy!
Yes, if you go to /m/fashion right now, it’s… barely there. You’re not going to get a ton of conversation when you post there. But that’s not the point. The point is to build out the community, so that, a year from now, as more and more people attempt to post and engage, there is a conversation. There’s a reason to be on the fediverse besides the meta circlejerk over how great the fediverse could be in theory.
This is the “content” people are craving. Find or start a magazine for your city, or your town, or your country. Write a post. Share posts from your favorite blogs. Comment on something, if you have anything to say at all. Share a youtube video—yes, a youtube video, I know, youtube sucks, but at least it gives us a path to a community here.
I think it’s a self-selection. To join the Fediverse, you usually need to be aware enough of social media culture to find out about it. So you get a bunch of people on social media who like talking about social media and what’s going on. I mean, Mastodon is full of weird hobbyists in the hashtags, but during migrations we get slammed with talk about social media.
We do need more of the hobby boards to be populated. The gaming boards, /m/gaming, [email protected], are pretty active but the niche boards like /m/GirlGamer are still quiet. !cat is pure joy and very active.
I think it would be nice to keep the social media talk to relevant boards. We’ve been flooding the tech and internet and fediverse boards with threads about Threads, maybe we should make a community like /m/Reddit or /m/Twitter specifically FOR those conversations about Threads and let /m/tech and /m/internet talk about the large amount of other stuff going on.
Wait, what’s the trick here? your !cat link worked, but /m/ clearly isn’t doing anything, and [email protected] didn’t do anything… how do you get it to auto-link?
@danhakimi Shit, I don’t know. Let me try this.
Okay, we can link to federated instances is we put a ! in front and type out the whole address. How do we link to communities inside… I’m taking this to m/KbinMeta.
I’ve noticed a few other Max Headroom AVIs on my Kbin browsing journeys, so I want to create a community that actively encourages and promotes using Max as your avatar in some form or another. The broadcast hijacker counts too.
You are missing the point that while you are free to do as you please, others also enjoy that same freedom. I don’t WANT to make posts about fashion, cooking, politics, or non-techie things, but if you do, then by all means, please do that? Be the change that you would like to see in the world, and all that? I hope you find your bliss.
While I am at it though, “nobody talks about anything else” is objectively false - it is a “feels like” statement that falls prey to the hyperbolic fallacy that your POV is the only one that matters. In point of fact though, there are TONS of such discussions happening, right now, all across the Fediverse! Granted, probably not at the frequency that you want, or perhaps not as easily discoverable as you wanted. Have you considered that Reddit or Twitter or Facebook etc. may legit serve your needs better at the moment, and that’s okay too?
For fantastic artwork here though, check out magazines such as m/[email protected], or here’s a post sharing a youtube video with nice music. For cooking, I see THOUSANDS of members making THOUSANDS of comments across MANY different places: here’s a comprehensive list of those across all of kbin.social - e.g. m/food has 2243 members and 2209 posts, and m/[email protected] has >1k comments (looks like concentrated mostly in a few posts such as https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/71429/What-do-you-eat-that-other-people-think-is-odd). Surely people might even talk about politics here, a tiny bit?:-P
And now we both are breaking your rule: discussing things about the fediverse. This place is for those with an early-adopter mindset: we don’t have daddy spez over here “taking care of us”, so we must build our own things. Thus, we often resort to talking about actions that involve that process - which I for one don’t think is a bad thing? It makes us better, to have these civil conversations about how to make things better moving forward! Although I think your post is poorly written, using inflationary emotional language that misses several points. Even so, I am absolutely LOVING how the comment section here isn’t full of harassers saying things like “U SUK”, but instead people offering constructive feedback, both positive and negative. To me, THAT is the difference between this place vs. Reddit that makes me enjoy being here more than there. Even though, admittedly yes, it does have FAR less content, and it is all of a biased nature (towards the topics that we here enjoy posting about).
Some folks really don’t understand they can absolutely get what they want out of the fediverse, they’re that accustomed to the limits of the more mainstream options. It’s whatever they want it to be. If you’re tired of not seeing enough of something, there’s nothing stopping you from creating your own instance or a community within a pre-existing instance and rallying others to engage. You’re always bound to find someone with a few similar interests around.
It will never grow or change if nobody is willing to directly participate in what they wish to see grow or change.
Nobody goes to Instagram to talk about Instagram, nobody goes to Tiktok to talk about Tiktok, nobody goes to Facebook (at all).
That’s because the companies take care of the techie stuff, while in the fediverse, we have to do that. So, it’s natural, I guess 🤷.
The fediverse will never appeal to the masses if we don’t embrace a wide variety of hobbies and interests.
I don’t think most of us actually want that. Then, it’ll become just like FB or Insta… the crowd I mean. The point is to attract the right audience, not just any audience.
We need people here talking about cooking. We need people here talking about fashion.
See, that is exactly what I want to get away from… you have that on TikTok and FB/Insta. That is exactly what I don’t want to see here. Of course, anyone can open a comm like that, I probably wouldn’t block it, but short clips of someone roasting hotdogs with cheese and calling that a super easy and healthy meal… nah, that is not for me.
Fashion as well. Those topics are for influencer wannabe types. That’s not what we’re trying to build here, are we?
Yes, if you go to /m/fashion right now, it’s… barely there.
Apparently, people around here are not interested in that topic 🤷. I’m sure a comm like that would be very popular on Insta.
This is the “content” people are craving.
Once again, the kind of people we’re not trying to attract anyway.
I don’t think most of us actually want that. Then, it’ll become just like FB or Insta… the crowd I mean. The point is to attract the right audience, not just any audience.
Right now, it’s attracting a circlejerk of people who only want to talk about how good the fediverse can be. I don’t know what you mean by “the right audience,” but this is not an audience I or anybody else wants to spend time around, and it’s not an audience that can build real collective knowledge or anything like that.
My menswear friends aren’t coming anywhere near the fediverse. Not because they’re “the wrong audience” and the fediverse only appeals to cool people, but because there’s nobody talking about menswear and the fediverse doesn’t appeal to people.
See, that is exactly what I want to get away from… you have that on TikTok and FB/Insta. That is exactly what I don’t want to see here.
Why do you follow it if you don’t want to see it?
I don’t see anything on FB or IG that I don’t avail myself of. I follow users I want to follow. I go on reddit, I join subreddits I want to join. I don’t have to run away from the content I pick.
Tiktok is dumb though, IDK why you’d want to see algorithm-selected content like that.
Of course, anyone can open a comm like that, I probably wouldn’t block it, but short clips of someone roasting hotdogs with cheese and calling that a super easy and healthy meal… nah, that is not for me.
I mean, you’re free to downvote that nonsense. It’s certainly not a problem on Reddit, it only exists in the subreddits that are specifically about cringey recipes.
Once again, the kind of people we’re not trying to attract anyway.
You mean people with hobbies? You exclusively want people here without hobbies?
All of your gripes sound like a lack of patience, or a need for the corporate instances of social media to be replicated in the fediverse.
DIY isn’t for everyone. It will have rough edges. It will lack things until you build them.
You want people to go somewhere? Make it worth their time. This is like burning man. Show up to a blank slate and make it fun/interesting/sustainable.
If that’s not for you… well… perhaps you should stop trying to square peg this round hole.
You want people to go somewhere? Make it worth their time. This is like burning man. Show up to a blank slate and make it fun/interesting/sustainable.
I’m trying to do that, but it’ll take more than one of us. I’m trying to encourage others to join me. Is that a problem?
All of your gripes sound like a lack of patience,
Six years is not enough time to wait for one other person who thinks suits are cool?
or a need for the corporate instances of social media to be replicated in the fediverse.
See, you’re saying “corporate instances of social media,” but what you mean is “any other social media that could possibly be perceived as a success.” The fediverse is uniquely lacking in content. It doesn’t need to be corporate for people to come here and make it something.
The fediverse is uniquely lacking in content. It doesn’t need to be corporate for people to come here and make it something.
You ever been on forums? You know what it’s like to not have upload privileges as a user and have to upload everything manually on some pix host?
The fediverse is like that and will most probably stay like that. Why? Cuz space costs money, and people host their own instances.
This fact (having to upload your content on external hosts, rather than just hitting the image upload button and the thing gets uploaded on the instance) coupled with how different the fediverse is and how harder it currently is to find communities you might like, is a no go for most normies. Deal with it 🤷.
Reddit became huge off the back of imgur, only developing its own (asstacular) image upload service in recent years. I haven’t had to upload many photos to kbin yet (it seems to work fine), but I can’t imagine imgur being a problem if I had to use it.
I highly doubt this is part of the problem.
Have you ever been on a social network under construction? The first people joining are the geeks who talk about geek stuff and the geek stuff now is the fediverse and microservers. It has always been like this.
We don’t need anything. We discuss based on interests. Talking for filling blank space is what led reddit to what it has become.
Don’t be in such a hurry to see your network filled with people talking for the sake of talking. We will come to this point and this will be the moment when we leave.
Have you ever been on a social network under construction? The first people joining are the geeks who talk about geek stuff and the geek stuff now is the fediverse and microservers. It has always been like this.
The fediverse has been like this for years. For… What, a decade? It did not take that long for Reddit users to start talking about their hobbies. I remember a lively community for my undergrad school where people discussed events, classes, student government, the schools’ governance structure, all sorts of shit, that was in… 2012? Very active for a very small niche. Much more active then than /m/nyc is now. Much, much, much more active.
I’m not in a hurry. My mastodon account is six years old, and there’s still nobody there talking about anything, I have found about 12 accounts I wanted to follow — half of them are software projects or software freedom organizations, and half of them are inactive. I go there, put up a post, none of my ~300 followers see it, because none of them check Mastodon, because it’s a complete ghost town.
I’ve been extremely patient. It’s about damn time the fediverse started to happen.
I would like to talk about indie games. Is there a good place for that?
If not the more general subs, there’s an indie community both on kbin.social and also lemmy.world. Both pretty small atm, but that’s the point in building them up
