Post #4195029

@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. :-)