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.

  • Ragnell@kbin.social
    4·
    1 year ago

    I think it’s a self-selection. To join the Fediverse, you usually need to be aware enough of social media culture to find out about it. So you get a bunch of people on social media who like talking about social media and what’s going on. I mean, Mastodon is full of weird hobbyists in the hashtags, but during migrations we get slammed with talk about social media.

    We do need more of the hobby boards to be populated. The gaming boards, /m/gaming, games@lemmy.world, are pretty active but the niche boards like /m/GirlGamer are still quiet. !cat is pure joy and very active.

    I think it would be nice to keep the social media talk to relevant boards. We’ve been flooding the tech and internet and fediverse boards with threads about Threads, maybe we should make a community like /m/Reddit or /m/Twitter specifically FOR those conversations about Threads and let /m/tech and /m/internet talk about the large amount of other stuff going on.

    • danhakimi@kbin.socialOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      Wait, what’s the trick here? your !cat link worked, but /m/ clearly isn’t doing anything, and games@lemmy.world didn’t do anything… how do you get it to auto-link?

        • Ragnell@kbin.social
          1·
          1 year ago

          Okay, we can link to federated instances is we put a ! in front and type out the whole address. How do we link to communities inside… I’m taking this to m/KbinMeta.

          @danhakimi

            • danhakimi@kbin.socialOP
              1·
              1 year ago

              that’s… confusing… why would you need the [@]instance for the present instance? couldn’t it just be [!]magazine with an optional [@]instance afterwards? wouldn’t that be easier to remember, easier to type out most of the time, and easier to distinguish from tagging users with @?