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.
Is this on /all? I did see some non-fediverse posts there, but like… a few of them were specifically from @196, which… the name of that magazine is an obscure reference to an inside joke from reddit, and the content is basically just, what if there was a second @memes. It’s not pulling people in.
I did see one cool post about Persian Rugs, though, I liked that.
I’ve spent a lot of time there, scrolling through them and searching for the ones I want. And it’s not that the ones I want don’t exist, but nobody posts or comments there. I posted to some of them, but there’s no conversation to be had. I commented where I could, but I’m afraid half of those people signed in for a day and then left when nothing was happening.
No, this was on /sub, and I’ve been aggressively curating my subscriptions and blocking things I don’t have any interest in.
Even looking now on /all with incognito, though, there’s only 2 even about Lemmy. I do see a few from 196. There’s posts about atheism, random tips from @youshouldknow, a Cosplayer, quite a few memes and shitposts, some political content about Florida, a nice flower, movie news, a couple antiwork posts, an article about a new Alzheimer’s drug.
It’s just not all about the Fediverse. Is it a popular topic? Hell yeah it is, especially considering Threads literally released yesterday, and the API blocks from Reddit are just now rolling out. It’s not just popular, it’s timely and current too. As those things age, it’ll come up less.
I mean, sure. There’s been days where I haunted Kbin/Lemmy then left. But currently, there’s very little else that fills the gap of Reddit beyond this. So I keep coming back, and I keep talking. That’s how it grows.