I’m an advocate for privacy, and anti-censorship(not that I’m a political person, but I personally think that one entity controlling everything could make somewhat of a rat box society), I’m confident that the fediverse platforms would one day be large enough to compete with popular sites like Twitter, Reddit, Youtube, etc. (given enough time for the website design/attractiveness, and user-friendliness, features, etc. to mature. )

But I feel like we won’t be achieving that reality anytime soon. at least in my speculations. if you look at the statistics, mastodon is 100x smaller than twitter, and also the fediverse gained almost 25% more users (which is just under a million) which is great but not enough. some viral impact, or a bigger influence is needed to get that number up.

TL;DR, the question; Is there some good ideas, marketing ideas, or anything conventional or non-conventional, that could help us gain more users?

Open to anything, as long as It’s possible to do, look outside the box, creative answers are very welcome.

some of the ideas so far;

  • [Dev Project] a Fediverse Game Store, with payment features, etc.

  • [Dev Project] Fediverse Forums Platform

  • [Dev project] making a fediverse search engine

  • [Dev project] ActivityPub Compliant Wordpress (as the First CMS target)

  • [bot] a meme bot for giving user points for reposting fediverse memes.

  • [fediverse feature request] Option to make watermarked image to crosspost.

  • [Community] Fediverse Youtube channel for fediverse related content. (Creator Awards, News, Podcast, and shoutouts to fediverse creators)

  • [Community] our own meme boards (is there something we can use that’s similar to 4chan?)

  • [Community] A page for lists of things that people can do to promote the fediverse

  • [Community] A page for a detailed-comparison of Fediverse platforms and Corporate platforms, to serve as a guide to the developers of Fediverse. more info

  • [Microblogging] user experience related Improvements, etc. see thread

Tags; [Community] [Dev Project] [Bot] [feature request] …

edit: I’m going to start a community organization based on this… if you have ideas for the name of our community, please post it here; https://lemmy.ml/post/56996

Thank you all for your input, I’ll try to summarize what we just discussed later, also thank you for participating in this discussion, I’ll have some of the ideas put into motion in the near future.

please continue posting your ideas here if you have some, maybe something useful can come up for the community to use

  • Metawish
    10•3 years ago

    I think a major hurdle is that those centralized services have the EASIEST sign up process and the EASIEST find things to follow so that the feed isnt dead or filled with junk. Most processes use phone numbers to find IRL friends, and gather some of the biggest names in various catagories to toss at someone and say “yo, here’s some shit to follow”.

    Can this hurdle be overcome? I think so, as long as there is a committed and active group of people. First, have multiple people host “first-stop” servers for newcomers. This helps to promote the federated method while also making it easy to join without thinking deeply about it. I know there already is a list of servers to join, but when someone is just starting off, it should automatically populate so they don’t even see it. There can be an option for someone who understands federation to select their server, but if we are reaching a non-tech audience, we have to understand some people are just not going to care.

    Second, the feed. Now, the local/federated timeline is a feed, but the personal feed needs to be worked on too. We need accounts that retoot a lot, have a variety of topics, and some that talk about how mastodon works. I can think of a few already. Now I know that we wanna move away from the like culture, so have these accounts be handled by a group instead of a user only.

    Third, make it easy to switch servers or host their own instance. We would hope to move a majority of people off the “first-comer” server. This is a small dev projrct and a major community project since the biggest hurdle there is that people don’t wanna pay for hosting or learn how to self-host. Some good projects that mostly manage hosting like Yunohost so its just convincing people that its a good thing.

    This is just off the top of my head but I love this discussion happening. Following closely

    • GwynneOP
      4•3 years ago

      so basically this;

      • make a first stop signup Instance so people wouldn’t get the the paradox of choice.

      ( I would ask joinmastodon to avoid said paradox of choice, maybe making a third button for people to just make an account right away)

      • get users to follow topics, two ways;
        • first signup, ask users what topics they’re interested in, then proceed to suggest people to follow. or/and
        • make a list (build into mastodon, etc.) of people to follow based on certain topics
      • making it easy for people to switch servers or host their own instance (so they can switch from that first-stop instance)
      • making self-hosting instances easy, like yunohost as an example.
    • GwynneOP
      3•3 years ago

      Second, the feed. Now, the local/federated timeline is a feed, but the personal feed needs to be worked on too. We need accounts that retoot a lot, have a variety of topics, and some that talk about how mastodon works. I can think of a few already. Now I know that we wanna move away from the like culture, so have these accounts be handled by a group instead of a user only.

      this would depend on who owns the most followed account based on topics. it might be a group or a user. No one can know for sure. this local feed problem can be solved with your first point, as explained earlier, get them to follow people/things from certain topics.

      I’m still thinking of how that feature could be implemented on a federated platform, since it seems like it could be used to feature accounts. that’s somewhat a corporate thing to do. maybe we could settle for the most popular/relevant accounts.

    • @[email protected]
      2•3 years ago

      Its curious that you are talking on a federated platform, but only mention Mastodon as an example of federated software 🤔

      • Metawish
        2•3 years ago

        Haha curious indeed (totally unintentional, I love Lemmy and can’t wait to see Yunohost add it to their app list!)

        Lemmy is just so good, I can’t think of anything that needs to be done to get people joining other than letting them know it exists! You two are doing fantastic work here 😁