So, I completely switched to FOSS federated social networks toward the middle of 2020. I love the Fediverse, but nobody I know IRL seems to care at all about it in any capacity, so I’m basically just screaming into a void full of other FOSSheads. How do I reconcile this? How do we get our IRL peeps on the Fediverse?
I do think that’s a big reason why there aren’t more people on FOSS-and-Federated (F&F, perhaps?) social media. I remember a time as well when picking an instance seemed like too much. My question was more about how to cope with and/or remedy this situation. And this isn’t just for myself, either. I feel like the Fediverse could use a little more diversity. Obviously there’s nothing wrong with programmers, but we need more other kinds of people in the Fediverse. That will also help us polish these tools.
some of it might come down to rather simple stuff, like how many clicks it takes for someone to actually get started. like with lemmy & masto there’s 3 just to get to a signup form (more if someone pokes about looking at instances), while reddit, fb & twitter just have 1. obviously there’s a reason for those extra clicks, but is there a way to reduce?
also making things like about/faq/guides easy to find and understand. masto’s guide is quite well-written and straightforward, but it’s located in the resources dropdown under ‘documentation’. that’s not going to be intuitive to find for a lot of folks. maybe that doesn’t matter too much, as they have a very cute video explainer, but it’s a thing to think about. the join.lemmy frontpage has straightforward language but quickly veers into mentioning more technical aspects (there’s a code screenshot immediately visible, for example), and that may be intimidating right off the bat – it conveys “this platform is for programmers” before a user gets an opportunity to see for themselves that there’s plenty of other stuff happening here. i don’t know if that truly matters, maybe people are only coming into a specific server link where they can see the variety of community posts for themselves? also the lemmy guide is mostly technical jargon, except the code of conduct. it’s important to have those details readily available, but i suspect the users who would want them would be seeking them out regardless of what is on a front page or newbie guide.
this is all ux psychology stuff, i suppose…a sticky business!
aside from that i guess continuing to foster (FOSSter?) a welcoming environment with pro-social behaviours, active caring. it can be a lonely feeling to look around and feel like you don’t have anything to share to the more active topics, or that you’re posting into the void, or that you’re picking up subtle social signals that accumulate to form a heavy burden (esp. heavy on those more diverse voices). maybe current users could take it upon themselves to post into more casual topics a little more frequently, and engage in earnest with those too? looking at the first page of the main lemmy community list it’s like…a whole lotta programming & politics, and very few casual topics. but that’s asking a lot of the existing communities, so idk. overall, balancing the labour of the existing community with the labour of those attempting to join in, and whether the existing community can take on some of that labour to alleviate the burden on newcomers, in order to encourage that diversity.