Hey folks, most of you probably have seen me around, I’m coming up on 2 years here and big believer like most of you. With the downfall of FB and Meta I have a lot of family who are genuinely interested in what I described as “A private way for us to share photos and updates, like we used to before FB… you know”, and there was genuine positive feedback.
Next I set up friendica, and so far I’m happy, I think it’ll do. Solid local sharing and privacy for sharing family specific things - but that’s the easy part. The hard part is now how do I convince people to join - and harder - stay.
A lot of my tech friends want to do something similar, I think small family oriented instances like this could be great! However, how do I explain what else there is to offer to family who, let’s all be real, do not want to hear an explanation of the fediverse? How can I word it in the most basic of ways without also sounding boring? That’s the real kicker. Interested in opinions
I love Friendica and I manage a Friendica instance that is developing very well. It is a feature-rich software, certainly the most complete software among the social networks of the Fediverse. However, I do not hide from you that it has several defects of an ergonomic nature that do not facilitate its adoption. It is not a point and shoot social network, like Mastodon, but it requires a bit of patience. The learning curve is steep and the mortality of users is very high, but if you get past the initial phase of disorientation, it becomes impossible to do without it. So remember that the most important requirement for using Friendica is not to be in a hurry! In my opinion, you are right to invite your friends, acquaintances and family who frequent Facebook, but do not expect their enthusiasm. And for those who mainly use Twitter, I recommend that they go to Mastodon! Finally, I hope that you will like a guide to Friendica that I have prepared in Italian, which should be easily translatable with any automatic translator
Thank you, this is all very helpful and level setting for me. I figure if I can get just one of my family off corporate social media, it’s a success. Hopefully them seeing me only posting in other places will see that
Friendica would be a hard sell to my own family right now. I just checked the App Store, and I don’t see anything obvious for it. That would be an immediate issue for my peeps.
For my family at least, user experience is king. The features they want, as easily as possible.
Years ago, I pitched signal over SMS, and failed. But eventually compromised on telegram. (Whoops!) but the thing that made even that change possible was smooth user experience and features they wanted (like stickers). Whereas signal was just text. The underlying technology was not a compelling argument. This has played out in other ways as well. Password managers. Email.
Figure out what they love most about the mainstream tools they use today. Meet them where they are, with their priorities in mind.
That’s my advice.
Not super obvious, but Raccoon for Friendica is a pretty solid app, though it’s only for Android so far.
