A reddit thread like that is more or less how I ended up here, though I’m still finding my way
It’s so sad to see people complaining about this new form of social media. “My friends and family are too stupid to use it, so I’m not going to use it as well.”
It seems to be much easier to complain instead of changing the own behaviour and look at it from another perspective.
Edit: words
That’s the network effect though, no fun being alone in a social network.
Mastodon in particular has this problem, as it is built so much around emphasizing genuine human interactions and being a true social network, rather than just a social media broadcasting information. If your network is not there you have little reason to be there either.
Commercial social media increasingly replace connections with engagement, which makes it easier for them to attract new users who don’t have their friends and family there. TikTok has taken it to the extreme it seems, judging by my very outside understanding.
What makes me hopeful is that it is to a large degree a problem of first movers, and Mastodon did manage to get past the initial hurdle of just being a tiny group of FOSS freaks. The first million users are the hardest million when fighting network effects, and the Fediverse has made it that far.
