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.
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