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
(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.
Using something like lemmy requires you to read a few paragraphs and make a decision about a home instance.
Hell, it isn’t even a major decision since moving instances is so easy now. Yes, it impacts the initial experience, but every social media app starts with a default experience and usage refines it from there.
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.
In addition to the points the other posts have made, I think we’ve been conditioned to believe that cost = quality, “you get what you pay for.”
People don’t pay for the mainstream st FF currently
Everyone wants to be where everyone else is at.
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
Well, often they are just not as good and active. Most people care about content and service more than principles.
I’m on Lemmy due to principles but I am the kind of guy who will reject every single “legitimate interest” cookie consent, even if I have to click 300 times to do that… And even I went back to Reddit after my first encounter with Lemmy. The lack of content is a huge issue.
Decentralisation is an issue as well. Yes, it is here to solve problems, but it solves problems that big platforms face, but it creates a bunch of small problems that kill small platforms.
Most people don’t want to be forced to choose which one of the hundred providers they want to use, when they never heard about any of them, they have no idea what’s the difference and don’t care enough to learn… Shit, even I never cared to check what is the difference between Lemmy instances. And then you might have one community split between 10 instances… Each with one or two posts… And all long dead. Maybe one community with 10 times the user base could survive?
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
Marketing budgets
It’s always contents. Being open source or decentralised is never the sole reason that convinces someone to use them. Same reason why people avoid hexbear even though it’s open source, or Truth social even though it’s based on Mastodon (I know they’re not open source anymore nor decentralised but you get the idea).
Too busy being enslaved under this system of wage slavery
