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?
I’m part of the admin team for a group on Facebook dedicated to a niche wargame. Anyone can apply to join but there is an entry question. The question itself tells the user where to find the answer (it’s both on Wikipedia and in the rules of the group!). We still get people that either don’t answer or put something like “I can’t be bothered looking it up”.
Those people do not get to join.
I’m firmly of the belief that if people are working to maintain a space for you then it’s on you to put a bare minimum of effort in to be allowed to use that space. We curate the group to keep content on topic and try to keep it a nice place to be.
The nuance is of course in what level of gatekeeping is healthy.