Post #4180876
2026-07-29 00:37 UTC
Replies (5)
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@GrahamDowns@mastodon.africa 2026-07-29 07:46
@chroma@raccoonisland.social The thing is, because there's a way to extract (monetary) value from them, those corporations can therefore justify investing capital into marketing, to make sure that more people know about them and how easy they are to use. And that's the point: marketing. Nobody's prepared to throw money at large-scale marketing campaigns for the Fediverse or IRC, because they have no way of making that money back. "If you build it, they will come" is no longer enough. You need to tell people about it. At scale. Not just one or two of your friends here and there, once in a blue moon, but thousands or hundreds of thousands of people at a time, constantly, so that it's always at the top of their minds. Neither the Fediverse nor IRC are particular difficult to get into. But people perceive them as difficult because there's a certain friction, a certain mental block, involved in the idea of selecting a server, and the for-profit networks take advantage of that by advertising the fact that THEIR platform is simple whereas the non-commercial ones are not. If we all banded together and each put some money down to start a massive, global, continuous marketing campaign for a month, I'm sure our platform would explode: I'm talking triple, maybe even quadruple, the MAU by the end of that month. But it has to be a constant, multi-platform campaign. I'm talking TV, radio, Google ads, X ads, Facebook ads, billboards, the lot. The average person should not be able to look anywhere for that month without being reminded of the Fediverse. We can do it. :-)
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@mhoye@cosocial.ca 2026-07-29 02:21
@chroma@raccoonisland.social I don't think this is entirely fair. The other thing they aren't is accessible via the Web and media-enabled. There was an entire generation of behemoth internet companies whose value prop was "you can drag and drop a cat gif onto a classic unix service on port 80" Slack? Billion dollar unicorn company that amounts to "you can drag and drop a cat gif into IRC." Dropbox? Drop a cat gif into FTP.
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@tasket@infosec.exchange 2026-07-30 02:47
@chroma@raccoonisland.social @flyingpenguin@infosec.exchange Fedi UX is inconvenient and/or broken in a number of ways. Its not the fact that people have to choose an instance. Its the fact that the fedi rubric still doesn't know what to do when you click on a link to fedi content, and no other application knows either. So an Ivory user may click on a link to a regular web page, and if that web page (or any page on any site) links to fedi content then the user will likely end up on a Mastodon web page – not Ivory – which doesn't recognize them and (gasp!) presents a prompt to log in to their home instance (on the web, not Ivory). The confusion is compounded by the makings of an eventual security nightmare; phisher's delight. There is so much UX f_ckery contained in that one example that I'm positive anyone encountering it more than once – and is not a techie who easily recognizes the context rug pulls and hops over them as you and I do – will probably run away from this. Non-fedi web sites can't effectively link to fedi content, because you are going to land on the author's instance not your own. So authors who began experimenting with fedi en masse in 2022 don't expose their readers to the fediverse.. they just keep using the "Share with Facebook/X/Insta" links. That is a sad, if not dead, ecosystem. Does the lack of monetization drain urgency from these UX issues? It might. But IMO, that still leaves us with a competence issue in much the same way that a Linux community which insists on presenting 7 different GUI options to users is a competence issue. Mastodon is the Linux Desktop of social media, and monetization won't make it popular. If monetization thoroughly explained the gap in popularity, we would see a version of the fediverse with instances that display ads. The problem is that the ActivityPub spec is incomplete (it should have a protocol handler definition) in addition to a raft of other UX issues that are ignored or even aggravated by Mastodon devs.
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@privacy@our.privacymatters.pro 2026-07-29 02:29
Well said. It's probably the primary reason I prefer it. I spun up my own instance, I get to curate my own experience, and the data is mine. I even get to write my own apps and I don't need to pay some already rich bastard for the convenience of API access...because it isn't necessary.
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@jake4480@c.im 2026-07-29 03:40
@chroma@raccoonisland.social so true. Reminds me of this quote I love from a piece I think about a lot (although I've lost the piece)- tough to monetize smaller groups of happy people.