Having spent a lot of time on Mastodon… There are tons of people there talking about federated and self-hosted services, software freedom, censorship, encryption, tech regulation… A very narrow range of topics directly surrounding the fediverse get a lot of attention.
But nobody talks about anything else. Nobody goes to Instagram to talk about Instagram, nobody goes to Tiktok to talk about Tiktok, nobody goes to Facebook (at all). People use social media to either talk to their friends or talk about their hobbies and interests.
And if your hobby is tech, that’s fine, enjoy. I like tech too. But please, if you have anything else to say, say it. The fediverse will never appeal to the masses if we don’t embrace a wide variety of hobbies and interests.
We need people here talking about cooking. We need people here talking about fashion. We need people here talking about immigration policy. We need people here talking about everything people enjoy!
Yes, if you go to /m/fashion right now, it’s… barely there. You’re not going to get a ton of conversation when you post there. But that’s not the point. The point is to build out the community, so that, a year from now, as more and more people attempt to post and engage, there is a conversation. There’s a reason to be on the fediverse besides the meta circlejerk over how great the fediverse could be in theory.
This is the “content” people are craving. Find or start a magazine for your city, or your town, or your country. Write a post. Share posts from your favorite blogs. Comment on something, if you have anything to say at all. Share a youtube video—yes, a youtube video, I know, youtube sucks, but at least it gives us a path to a community here.
You missed my point. They’re not on IG to bitch about IG, they’re on IG to talk about art and they’re bitching about IG on the side. They’re ostensibly there to share their art, and that’s why you follow them, right?
And yeah, some people go there to teach you how to be an influencer, but we’re all aware that they irredeemably suck.
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I don’t think most people who are new to the fediverse really want to see three dozen threads about the fediverse as they scroll. I couldn’t possibly convince somebody to join the fediverse to talk about fashion, because there’s nobody here talking about fashion, it’s like going to a baseball stadium to talk about library science.
People are going to Threads instead. When I point out how shitty Threads is and how people should use Mastodon instead, they say, “you’re right! Threads is shitty! I’m gonna go use threads.” Because threads is a social network and mastodon is a theory.
In my experience which is worth one (1) datapoint, people talk about all sorts of stuff.
Yes, people do talk about the fediverse as part of it, but usually it’s about how we can make it better rather than how our corporate overlords have made it worse.
And I’d say that fediverse metacontent is less than 1% of my feed, so it’s not universal, it’s very much down to how you set things up.
Places like kbin will get more because they’re newer. I’m not on Threads or Blue sky or whatever but I imagine a lot of the chat there is about their own shiny new thing as well.