When trying to convince people to move to Fediverse services, people will often refer to them as “alternatives”, calling Mastodon a Twitter-alternative, PeerTube a YouTube-alternative, etc. But I don’t think this is the most effective approach.
This is a problem I noticed before I even heard of the Fediverse, because FOSS advocates do the same thing.
The issue is that to the average person, THING-alternative just means that if you already have THING, you don’t need it. Or even worse, people will assume it’s an inferior imitator. Most people aren’t looking for “alternatives”. When they adopt new social media it’s in response to trends.
Look at mainstream social media for example. When TikTok appeared as a new video platform, it didn’t call itself a “YouTube alternative”.
So, at a minimum, I would advise not referring to services as “alternatives” but simply “cool new services/apps” and exalting their best features from a user perspective.
I have other thoughts on how to advertise the Fediverse, but I don’t want to make this post too long.
So how would you describe the fediverse in just 2 words? Or perhaps 5 words?
5 words: Reddit for leftists and nerds.
I wouldn’t. I would just describe the services people might be interested in. Users have specific needs they want services to provide. I would talk to them in terms of those needs.
As for why federation, just mention that you don’t need to create many separate accounts. For example, you can follow a PeerTube account from Mastodon.
Most people don’t have the patience to listen to a sales pitch. I think we need to start with a concept that is easy for most people to understand. For me, “Reddit alternative” is the simple concept.
Agreed
Good old
Not just five words. The Fediverse is a modular, federated Reddit-alternative that isn’t owned by any specific person - that makes it immune from traditional shittification of online services, that can be forked by others to be used better if necessary. It also is rapidly developing tools and functionality that makes it better (at least as far as Piefed is concerned), and as it grows organically could be better prepared at dealing with bots, grifters, and trolls.
It won’t appeal to all though. It just flatout is a downgrade for right-wingers who want a twitter-like “let me behave how I want” experience. And that’s a good thing.
Of course it wont appeal to all, you failed to write a marketing blurb. This is just an about page no one reads
My take:
Let’s call a thing we do on social networks an activity. Posting a thing on X is activity, posting a link on Reddit is an activity, commenting is one, posting a pic on Facebook is an activity. Fediverse is a loose cloud of federated (hence the name) instances that regardless of how they present activities, exchange those using the so called ActivityPub protocol. So not only you can use the content on the network in the way you prefer, you also don’t have a single point of failure like the separate companies that run the old social networks. The point of federation is that you can set up your own instance and exchange with others, you can join the instance of your neighbor, or join one of the big ones that are maintained by a few non-profits created for that
I think I made it in 5Ah, you wanted words :_DFor most people that means either:
a) So that’s kinda like Reddit or b) TLDR; back to Reddit
It does get less wall-of-text-feel when said out loud. But then, I’m afraid that people from examples a and b would never move from what they already know anyway
For me, I was actively looking for an alternative to Reddit. So when I heard fediverse was somewhat similar to Reddit, it immediately made me want to try it. I only found out about the federation, different servers etc after I properly started trying to use Lemmy/Kbin at that time.
Yes, but that’s the difference. You had internal motivation to find something else. If one has no issue with Reddit and someone just comes up and says “hey, checkout this thing!”, it takes a certain kind of person that always chases the new shiny, to check it out. For most, that triggers “what do you want to sell me and why would I want that?” Especially after so many years of marketing being based on first creating a need, instead of just providing information
Yeah but we still need to start with an easy concept before going into details. I would at least start by saying “Similar to Reddit but better in multiple ways.”
Might be. The angle I was aiming at was to label bigtech networks as passe and with unclear motives in comparison to grassroots movements
Esp in context of “Reddit alternative” doing a disservice