This is a follow-up from my previous thread.
The thread discussed the question of why people tend to choose proprietary microblogging platfroms (i.e. Bluesky or Threads) over the free and open source microblogging platform, Mastodon.
The reasons, summarised by @noodlejetski@lemm.ee are:
- marketing
- not having to pick the instance when registering
- people who have experienced Mastodon’s hermetic culture discouraging others from joining
- algorithms helping discover people and content to follow
- marketing
and I’m saying that as a firm Mastodon user and believer.
Now that we know why people move to proprietary microblogging platforms, we can also produce methods to counter this.
How do we get “normies” to adopt the Fediverse?
On Mastodon, I used the search function to shotgun random topics that interest me, and then followed all the hashtags on the posts that came up.
Over time, I started replacing following hashtags with following my favorite users who I discovered through those hashtags.
Then I started discovering and following their favorite users through their boosts.
Now that my feed is pretty much where I want it I tend to click “hide boosts” on anyone new that I follow, to prevent their every random amusement from cluttering my feed.
The end result is fantastic, but it took awhile to get there.
Follow hashtags is the way to go. Mastodon should prompt new users to follow hashtags by recommending some topics for the user to choose from. EVERY social media has one of these now.