More people would be great, especially for niche communities.
I don’t see #2 as that big of a problem. Do we want people who won’t expend any effort to join? I guess everyone sees the line between accessible and “dumbed down” a little bit differently. I’m not saying #2 is great. I recognize it is an obstacle. But it’s also kind of the point of Lemmy…in the sense that this is not a monolithic corporate one-size-fits-all kind of endeavor. In a way, the obstacle also serves as a teaching moment, if you will, of how this thing even works.
Item 4 seems a bit chicken-and-egg to me. But my guess is, not being able to find those communities isn’t nearly as big of a problem as those communities not having any content / participants. I can see the argument that one causes the other, but I haven’t found it very challenging to find those empty places. It’s just not much fun to hang out there by yourself.
Edit: I need to see what dried beans I have and maybe go shopping. I will give this a try with a couple different types of beans and report back if I fart or not.
Hope you have some alpha-galactosidase at your disposal.
The simplified explanation: A reason beans give some people gas is due to certain types of sugars and carbohydrates they contain. Those sugars are water soluble. Seems like brewing beans would concentrate those sugars and lead to epic tootage.
Also, one method for reducing how much gas that beans cause is to soak them in lots of water. Basically, soak them for up to 8 hours, drain, rinse, and repeat a couple more times. It works on the same principal, that the soaking process will remove at least some of the problematic, water soluble sugars. Supposedly adding a small amount of baking soda helps, too. I’m less certain about that.
That’s what I have, but she likes the slim new hotness, and really prioritizes battery life. She isn’t worried about Linux performance, though, because she doesn’t use it, lol.
“Normies” are not “microbloggers”. Most people just want to follow what their friends and family and news organizations and “influencers” are posting.
My biggest gripe with the fediverse (indirectly) is that all the information I would get on Twitter about my city is not available to me - concert announcements, restaurant specials, road closures, major news, hobby meetups, etc. They’re posting on Facebook and Instagram (which is IMO the worst of all social platforms) and slowly adopting Threads. My issue with these platforms is mostly regarding the algorithm deciding what it thinks you want. This is driven by advertising.
Twitter didn’t really pick up steam until celebrities and news outlets were posting and engaging on the platform. Then they pushed hard for ads to increase revenue and expand features and stability (for better or worse). Then they just got greedy. Then they were sold for the dumbest amount of money in the history of sales.
Getting normies here means getting influencers here. Influencers want to make money for being assholes. If you don’t want influencers and ads here, don’t ask for the normies to come. Accept the beauty of this micro micro blogging platform. If you want to share outside the open fediverse, embrace cross posting to the closed platforms. That’s kind of the whole point of it. You can post in your tiny little corner while still engaging with the more popular platforms.
I don’t work in tech and I’m not a video game player. Am i a normie? I stay on Facebook because of the things you mentioned - i want to know how my old aunt is doing, get the link to my cousin’s music performances, see what play or concert is showing this weekend, and post to my neighborhood when my dogs escape. I only used Twitter to follow local bars, restaurants, and music venues for happy hours and event info. That kinda died with covid so i closed my Twitter account. I don’t really understand influencers. I’d love to see more local content here but I’m not sure we have the people to support it. I guess the way to start is to share the local info i get from Facebook to the Texas and dfw communities here, but that doesn’t draw more people. Among my friends, r/ is sort of made fun of as something their husbands follow for jokes, memes, and boobs.
I should edit my comment and add “post rage bait”.
You’re absolutely right. I’d describe myself similarly to you. I even created a local community here for my city. But it feels like I’m speaking quietly on top of a mountain while the nearest person is a time zone away. Perhaps a handful of people would stop by and subscribe to the content but this isn’t about subscribing - it’s about engaging. Communities are about exchanging ideas. Posting something that compels people to engage is one way to increase activity. As more people notice the community, they’ll be more likely to engage when there’s enough noise around that doesn’t single them out too much.
The major social platforms know this. This is why they promote trash over quality information. This is why I get frustrated on Instagram because it continues to show me posts from two or three days ago notifying me that I missed an exciting event.
You can post all the great informative content you want on your little corner of the fediverse but without engagement, is it really there?
I guess this ties into marketing, but I think rebranding the “fediverse” as the “social web” would be a good start. It has a broad neutral tone that I think is easier for regular people to latch on to.
Maybe I don't want the "normies" around, whoever they are, but personally I would like to see a lot more people joining in such as Go players, Skyrim modders, situationists, auto mechanics, British panel show enthusiasts, death metal guitarists, discordians, card sharks, magicians, acid heads, skydivers, xylophonists, and amateur zookeepers. This part of fedi has more than enough politics and computers and too little everything else.
I keep seeing that “people are talking about beans”, but I don’t actually see people TALKING about beans. I’m convinced that the joke is, that nobody actually talks about beans. Just talks about how other people are talking about beans…which they aren’t. That’s somehow the joke.
hohoho… My friend you have fallen into the trap. By me responding to this comment about how nobody is actually discussing beans, we are now engaged in a discussion about beans!
Thus furthers our plot of packing bean related content into the algorithm. This is the only way to save our timeline from Skynet!
Each service you want will probably have a different set of options.
When you say Apple cloud, that could mean all sorts of things.
Specificity in tech is crucial.
You may want to start with one type of service, and go from there. You’re about to head down a deep rabbit hole that includes things like Security Posture, Risk Management, etc.
what are you talking about? bluesky isn’t open source, the protocol is, and it reeks of embrace, extend, extinguish by branding itself as an open network
I don’t actually mean it’s EEE but that whatever they are doing feels similar; besides, with one big server controlled by a corporation in the centre of their ecosystem, they could “defederate” any rising AT-compatible competitor servers out of existence.
They might not now, but don’t ever trust a company to not do this.
What would be the point of putting in the effort to make Bluesky or other ATProtocol apps selfhostable if they didn’t want people to do that? Doesn’t make any sense
The danger (as they can see) are not selfhosters, but larger competitive instances. They don’t allow AT servers of over 10 users and 1500 events a hour. This is clearly targeted to prevent large-scale instances (fediverse style) from being created.
Whatever you think of the tertiary organisations, it seems like you’re better off donating directly to a cause that needs it, rather than funding a bunch of middle managers to give it to someone else.
Stop addressing them as “normies” would be a great start.
Can’t speak for rest of the Fediverse as I’m not super active on microblogging anymore, but at least here on Lemmy, there is such a strong “in” culture and quirky skewed perception of the world, and often times come off as actively hostile against those that do not share the same quirky skewed world view. The anti-AI, anti-corporate, would rather shoot myself in the foot if it’s not FOSS, etc kind of views, with their own strong vocal proponents, comes off as unwelcoming. People are addicted to socials because of the positivity they can get, not the negative sentiments that’s often echo’ed.
Amongst those that doesn’t share the kind of view, you’d already be looking at an extreme small minority that might be willing to give the platform a try, but as long as the skewed perception of the world dominates the discussions, you can expect them to go back to main stream centralized platforms where they can get more main stream view points based discussions.
Thats the neat part, you don’t. Social medias value isn’t determined by it’s tech. Its value is determined by who and what you can interact with. For example, people wont leave Facebook because everyone they know is on facebook because people won’t leave Facebook. Twitter is literally run by a nazi at this point and still it’s the same story where Mastodon and Bluesky aren’t even close. Same thing for reddit and lemmy. Lemmy simply doesn’t have the content reddit does, look no further than sports subreddits where any given game has a live game thread with a hundred or more unique commentors.
If you want mode people to come here you’re going to need to do two things. One you need to post content people want to see, and two you need to get very very lucky because as it stands if you don’t care enough about decentralization to lose out of a lot of content, theres literally no reason to be here. Its a long slow road and you’re still going to need reddit to do something stupid before we see another growth spike.
I think picking an instance is just something people will have to learn and get used to as that’s very essential to the fediverse experience.
I personally hate algorithms picking shit for me and that’s why I use lemmy and why I used reddit back when it first came out. I search out and pick what content I see on my feed.
I definitely agree with more marketing. It’s insane to think there’s a lot of people that still use reddit and never even heard of lemmy
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