We have a lot of options for all social media and other apps, but it is hard to catch people’s attention. How can we make more people use these platforms rather than a platform that p.dophiles run
Onboarding is a nightmare
Advice is always “first make a series of crucial yet obtuse choices based on vibes” and then immediately pivots to “get good”
New platforms, launchers, apps, etc are hailed as perfect alts one day and decried as abandoned buggy corpo trash 3 days later
A lot of people don’t care and are just looking for their instant gratification.
They also don’t want to entertain the idea that they may have been doing things wrong all this time.
Open source does not have billions of dollars to spend on marketing.
We can work together to polish apps/software and use word of mouth. This will help to grow these other options.
Explosive growth is driven by large dollar amounts. Think LinkedIn being included as a shortcut in Windows, or every phone coming with Facefuck pre installed.
Until we can get people away from platforms owned by major corporations we will not be able to shrug off the programs they push on people.
I’m going with “it’s not actually harder to promote decentralized options”. But they tend not to have marketing teams.
If one were to assemble an active professional marketing team for a decentralized tool, the team would be similarly effective as they would be for a centralized tool.
I agree, we need to promoting marketing decentralized/federated tools)
One answer: People love their defaults. Computers come pre installed with Windows, MacOS, (Bad) Android. Creative professionals are trained on Adobe Suite. Business professionals are trained and certified for MS Office and SaaS ERP Software. They don’t look beyond the defaults because their goal is not to determine which software/tool gives the most value or teaches them the most but which software/tool is the default that will give them a job and unfortunately FOSS is not the default for 90% of those people.
Its not as convinient, and you can’t blame anyone but yourself when it breaks.
I’d say that last part is more important than people realize.
Normies are used to the idea of whining whenever something doesn’t work. If they don’t have someone to whine to, they genuinely have no concept of what to do instead.
Interacting with the open source ecosystem is a very humanizing endeavor. Modern consumers are pretty much anything but human at this point.
Very true. I have been guiding SO down the foss road and they’ve learned so quickly and are now empowered to do things themselves. It would be so easy if people wouldn’t bitch and put a tiny amount of work in.
(1) Network effects. People want to use social media that everyone else is using. Once a site achieves a critical mass of users it becomes the obvious choice to join. It also becomes difficult to leave because if you have built up a personal network on most sites, you can’t take it with you.
(2) Convenience. Most sites don’t require a lot of effort to use. In the past few years this one has surprised me a bit. The level of effort most people are willing to put in to trying a new site is basically 0. Using something like lemmy requires you to read a few paragraphs and make a decision about a home instance. That is too much effort for a lot of people.
For convenience, it also doesn’t help that OSS is extremely hit and miss and inconsistent between developers.
This includes:
- App names
- UI/UX
- Features
- Quality of life
- Being a fucking dick to newcomers
At the end of the day, regular people want something that just works™. They don’t want to have to dig through
ancient tomesold form posts to figure out that a depreciated version of an app has been supersceeded by a slightly differently named version by a completely different dev that requires some weird dependencies that conflict with another app’s dependencies and everything just breaks at some point… It’s a pain in the ass.Social media networks without attention based algorithms also aren’t quite as addictive.
A lot of great comments, but another one that’s not mentioned: money and advertising
Open source / non profit run websites don’t have money to burn on mobile ads, and many wouldn’t want to put money into the ad industry even if they did.
It doesn’t guarantee users, plenty of startups fail after promotional campaigns, but it definitely helps people learn about the platform
Because marketing department haven’t been open sourced yet
Microsoft, Apple, etc spend billions on marketing, whereas open source spends about 0. It relies wholly on word of mouth advertisements, and just showing people that it’s actually better and free
Believe you me, if tomorrow we get world wide advertising for a free operating system that works better than Window crap or apple crap, that won’t spy, and is free, a LOT more people will jump in.
I’m guessing that “open source” either is completely u known or still is a bit of a dirty word for people, associated with “alternative software” so it must be worse than the “real” software, right?
Even though in many MANY ways its superior to corporate software. And its free. And its almost always free as well.
I’m guessing that the cloud services has also been a response from tech companies to open source because on the one hand they get to use open source software for free without giving back anything and on the other hand they get to sell subscription services for stuff that should be free anyways.
Again, most SaaS software providers put there float on open source software, yet they’ll charge you through the nose for the little layer they built on top of that. There are other such layers available for free in the open source community,but you’ll have to set it up yourself. That is the basic difference.
For me, o host everything myself.
That means we can open source marketing. We can make people work for marketing open source apps, while they are unemployed. With the rise of unemployment, I think that makes sense
People do not care about decentralization and privacy that is the harsh reality. The best way to promote privacy is to not talk about privacy and provide concrete advantages and unique feature.
Most people moved to Cara not pixelfed. Most people moved to upscrolled not loops.
Also the marketing is terrible. The fediverse creators should go to tech podcast, contact tech medias, participating to general tech events etc
The fediverse creators should go to tech podcast, contact tech medias, participating to general tech events etc
Maybe not the Lemmy devs. That’d harm more than it’d help
I saw a post about Upscrolled and commented that people should stop joining centralised social media because they all end up the same way, and I got a downvote. On Lemmy.
My friends were all excited about bluesky when that launched, and I told them to join the fediverse because bluesky was just Early Twitter. They didn’t listen, then bluesky welcomed ICE. Now they’re excited about upscrolled, and I told them to join the Fediverse, and they still aren’t listening.
All of which is to say, I have no fuckin idea my guy. People are weird.
Marketing budgets
We need an open source marketing team
Everyone wants to be where everyone else is at.
UX sucks. Accessibility is nonexistent.
It’s always contents. Being open source or decentralised is never the sole reason that convinces someone to use them. Same reason why people avoid hexbear even though it’s open source, or Truth social even though it’s based on Mastodon (I know they’re not open source anymore nor decentralised but you get the idea).
