We have a lot of options for all social media and other apps, but it is hard to catch people’s attention. How can we make more people use these platforms rather than a platform that p.dophiles run
A lot of people don’t care and are just looking for their instant gratification.
They also don’t want to entertain the idea that they may have been doing things wrong all this time.
Open source does not have billions of dollars to spend on marketing.
We can work together to polish apps/software and use word of mouth. This will help to grow these other options.
Explosive growth is driven by large dollar amounts. Think LinkedIn being included as a shortcut in Windows, or every phone coming with Facefuck pre installed.
Until we can get people away from platforms owned by major corporations we will not be able to shrug off the programs they push on people.
One answer: People love their defaults. Computers come pre installed with Windows, MacOS, (Bad) Android. Creative professionals are trained on Adobe Suite. Business professionals are trained and certified for MS Office and SaaS ERP Software. They don’t look beyond the defaults because their goal is not to determine which software/tool gives the most value or teaches them the most but which software/tool is the default that will give them a job and unfortunately FOSS is not the default for 90% of those people.
I’m going with “it’s not actually harder to promote decentralized options”. But they tend not to have marketing teams.
If one were to assemble an active professional marketing team for a decentralized tool, the team would be similarly effective as they would be for a centralized tool.
I agree, we need to promoting marketing decentralized/federated tools)
Its not as convinient, and you can’t blame anyone but yourself when it breaks.
I’d say that last part is more important than people realize.
Normies are used to the idea of whining whenever something doesn’t work. If they don’t have someone to whine to, they genuinely have no concept of what to do instead.
Interacting with the open source ecosystem is a very humanizing endeavor. Modern consumers are pretty much anything but human at this point.
(1) Network effects. People want to use social media that everyone else is using. Once a site achieves a critical mass of users it becomes the obvious choice to join. It also becomes difficult to leave because if you have built up a personal network on most sites, you can’t take it with you.
(2) Convenience. Most sites don’t require a lot of effort to use. In the past few years this one has surprised me a bit. The level of effort most people are willing to put in to trying a new site is basically 0. Using something like lemmy requires you to read a few paragraphs and make a decision about a home instance. That is too much effort for a lot of people.
Lemmy is a good example of non-obvious usage, even for seasoned redditors, let alone the general public. At first it presents familiar, but the nuances aren’t intuitive.
For convenience, it also doesn’t help that OSS is extremely hit and miss and inconsistent between developers.
This includes:
- App names
- UI/UX
- Features
- Quality of life
- Being a fucking dick to newcomers
At the end of the day, regular people want something that just works™. They don’t want to have to dig through
ancient tomesold form posts to figure out that a depreciated version of an app has been supersceeded by a slightly differently named version by a completely different dev that requires some weird dependencies that conflict with another app’s dependencies and everything just breaks at some point… It’s a pain in the ass.Social media networks without attention based algorithms also aren’t quite as addictive.
Because marketing department haven’t been open sourced yet
Microsoft, Apple, etc spend billions on marketing, whereas open source spends about 0. It relies wholly on word of mouth advertisements, and just showing people that it’s actually better and free
Believe you me, if tomorrow we get world wide advertising for a free operating system that works better than Window crap or apple crap, that won’t spy, and is free, a LOT more people will jump in.
I’m guessing that “open source” either is completely u known or still is a bit of a dirty word for people, associated with “alternative software” so it must be worse than the “real” software, right?
Even though in many MANY ways its superior to corporate software. And its free. And its almost always free as well.
I’m guessing that the cloud services has also been a response from tech companies to open source because on the one hand they get to use open source software for free without giving back anything and on the other hand they get to sell subscription services for stuff that should be free anyways.
Again, most SaaS software providers put there float on open source software, yet they’ll charge you through the nose for the little layer they built on top of that. There are other such layers available for free in the open source community,but you’ll have to set it up yourself. That is the basic difference.
For me, o host everything myself.
That means we can open source marketing. We can make people work for marketing open source apps, while they are unemployed. With the rise of unemployment, I think that makes sense
but why would they? and marketing is not cheap, you know. who will paid for them?
And you think the same questions don’t apply to developers?
Same thing there, buddy, yet here we are giving for free
They are already unemployed. They may get experience this way
Zero chance I’d ever do this. I wouldn’t even do it for payment.
Familiarity.
It was a pain in the ass for me to even try to get people I knew to even try Discord, if they weren’t already on it. They just love their Facebook too much to even take a moment to poke their head out and see the alternatives.
A lot of great comments, but another one that’s not mentioned: money and advertising
Open source / non profit run websites don’t have money to burn on mobile ads, and many wouldn’t want to put money into the ad industry even if they did.
It doesn’t guarantee users, plenty of startups fail after promotional campaigns, but it definitely helps people learn about the platform
I think that it would be easier for them to give up social media completely than to move somewhere else without people.
The only way would be to have something there that they need or want and then tell them to make an account in a specific place, no choosing instances bullshit, they’ll figure it out eventually if they’re interested.
Social media only matters if there’s people there. How can you convince someone of jumping ship to an empty place?
You’d think that would be a selling point these days
Well yeah for us antisocial freaks lmao
UX sucks. Accessibility is nonexistent.
Depends on what you mean by accessibility.
You can browse and post on the fediverse from any text-only browser, which makes it easy to use screen reader software and navigate it without a mouse.When I wrote the above I was thinking about FOSS generally which wasn’t what the OP was asking so I apologize. Lemmy is more navigable with a screen reader compared to Reddit, though improvements can be made.
I do stand by my statement regarding FOSS generally, especially desktop Linux. I feel legitimately trapped in Windows because accessibility on Linux was poor when I first started using it in 2009 and as actually gotten worse since then.
I’m bitter that my blindness bars me from the security and privacy Linux offers over Windows.
Yeah, accessibility in FOSS software really is lacking.
I don’t think reddit even has an option for alttexts. Lemmy really encourages it.
I was watching a livestream the other day by someone who appears intelligent and knowledgeable enough to know that she should probably give up Windows and use Linux instead. So far as I could tell there isn’t really any reason why she shouldn’t. It was the kind of stream where she had plenty of time to just talk freely about whatever was on her mind, and usually that’s nothing to do with computers or their operating systems. But she was thinking of doing it. She worries about this and that. She wonders if OBS will work as well, she imagines it would be a lot of work, she seems unsure that her tech skills would be good enough, she worries that it might go wrong, that it might not be worth it, that she might pick the wrong distro, that her webcam wouldn’t work, that it might be a colossal waste of time for very little benefit.
People unaccustomed to software freedom find it hard to understand how it would benefit them. People are afraid of change.
Bringing more people would ruin these platforms just as they ruined the other platforms.
As much as it would be nice to see more activity on the Fediverse as a whole. It would all turn upside down very quick the more people jumped on and it would devolve things into a similar environment that readily accessible social media platforms have long devolved into.
Was it ever easy?
