Having spent a lot of time on Mastodon… There are tons of people there talking about federated and self-hosted services, software freedom, censorship, encryption, tech regulation… A very narrow range of topics directly surrounding the fediverse get a lot of attention.
But nobody talks about anything else. Nobody goes to Instagram to talk about Instagram, nobody goes to Tiktok to talk about Tiktok, nobody goes to Facebook (at all). People use social media to either talk to their friends or talk about their hobbies and interests.
And if your hobby is tech, that’s fine, enjoy. I like tech too. But please, if you have anything else to say, say it. The fediverse will never appeal to the masses if we don’t embrace a wide variety of hobbies and interests.
We need people here talking about cooking. We need people here talking about fashion. We need people here talking about immigration policy. We need people here talking about everything people enjoy!
Yes, if you go to /m/fashion right now, it’s… barely there. You’re not going to get a ton of conversation when you post there. But that’s not the point. The point is to build out the community, so that, a year from now, as more and more people attempt to post and engage, there is a conversation. There’s a reason to be on the fediverse besides the meta circlejerk over how great the fediverse could be in theory.
This is the “content” people are craving. Find or start a magazine for your city, or your town, or your country. Write a post. Share posts from your favorite blogs. Comment on something, if you have anything to say at all. Share a youtube video—yes, a youtube video, I know, youtube sucks, but at least it gives us a path to a community here.
This seems extremely elitist, even if just for the fact that you do not know what other knowledge (and experiences and viewpoints and…) those people who’d be interested in those communities would bring.
If you want a site comprised entirely of - what it seems to me - techbros who talk about how large their homelab Kubernetes clusters are, you should do that by curating your experience with the general platform, not by excluding anyone else, which is what you’re doing here even if you don’t realize it.
I personally want people from all walks of life to set up shop in the fediverse (as long as they’re not jerks). Even if I’ll never see or interact with 99% of what they create, maybe that last 1% will solve an obscure problem I encounter, or recommend me something (whether it be a product or recipe or location or…) that will change my life for the better.
But they won’t. Which is fine, I like it that way. They can have their mainstream social media where they share family photos, boob jobs, ass jobs, nose rings, whatever, I get to have this, the fediverse. People that mostly want to talk about those things, they can have mainstream social media.
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No, I actually do. I just don’t care if people show things like that off when they want to (or ever for that matter). That was just an example. I generally don’t like sharing family, personal things on social media. Heck, I don’t like it when my wife shares pics of our little one on FB… she does it and I ignore it, but that doesn’t mean I like it. That is the main reason why I don’t like mainstream social media, everyone just feels the need to share everything… it’s just noise to me.