Text for readability:
So far, Americans using RedNote have said they don't care if China has access to their data. Viral videos on TikTok in recent days have shown Americans jokingly saying they will miss their personal "Chinese spy," while others say they are purposefully giving RedNote access to their data in a show of protest against the wishes of the U.S. government.
"This also highlights the fact that people are thirsty for platforms that aren't controlled by the same few oligarchs," Quintin said. "People will happily jump to another platform even if it presents new, unknown risks."
If you want more people to join the fediverse, you have to improve the user experience. People don’t want to read an article breaking down what the fediverse is, how to join an instance, how to find content, etc.
Streamline the join process so it doesn’t require learning the lore and technical training. Stop promoting the fediverse generally, and instead push people to easy to use frontends and popular instances. Remove the barriers to entry. If they want to dig deeper into different instances and the technical stuff, let them do that later. Stop loading the info dump at the front.
You get it. Well said.
I agree that promoting the fediverse generally kind of doesn't make sense. People join communities, not web protocols.
I wonder if we shouldn't talk so much about "the fediverse" as we do about individual instances, because that's what people actually join. They get the rest of the fediverse for free, but their home server will always be home. Just like with reddit back in the day, how I may not have identified much with the reddit overculture, I did love some of its communities.
Like look at the difference between the slrpnk communities, and the programming.dev communities. That's something to be celebrated, like, come join this server - look at all the cool things we're doing!
I've seriously thought about starting up a website to do exactly this. The problem is I already have a mile long project list. Oh and I suck at UX lmao, backend and hosting/infrastructure stuffs that's my jam. Putting together a nice UX with a good flow and then successfully promoting it....
Pixelfed’s app release seems like a good start.
That would just turn the fediverse into tiktok/facebook/whatever. The whole point is that you have to engage intentionally here, which prevents you from being served things that other people/countries/companies want you to see.
Its not hard to join here, but its not going to serve up the same experience so people leave. People also follow others, so there aren't many people on those other platforms suggesting people join them in the fediverse.
I dont understand why anyone cares if the next big social media exodus off-ramp is to the fediverse or not. A huge influx of people that dont like this style of content and how its served to them isn't going to make this better for those who do.
This is ridiculous gatekeeping.
The point of the fediverse is to get decentralized platforms not in the hands of corporate or government interests.
If you want a cliquey, niche space, then stay on an instance focused for that.
The fediverse allows us to do both. Some instances will go one way, others will go the other. Each can have what they want. And both can communicate if they do wish.