Convener: Gilles Dutilh (@depemig@social.coop)

Participants who chose to record their names here:

• Scott Jenson (@scottjenson@social.coop

Website: Gilles’ research project is described here: https://org.basel.social

Notes

• In this session, I hope to discuss a project we are working on, in which we aim to learn from active Fediversians, disappointed Fediversians (inactive accounts) and potential Fediversians (the rest of the world), by asking them:

  • What do they like?
  • What do they need?
  • What do they hate?
  • What convinces them to join a federated platform?
  • What do they (mis-) understand?

• Please join to discuss and throw in your ideas for questions you would like to ask people.

• Many ideas were discussed, which can broadly be categorized as

  • What did we already learn about people’s preferences?
  • How to get to know the people we want to involve in the Fediverse?
  • What do we want the fediverse to be?
  • What do we think that people want, and how to get there.

What did we already learn about people’s preferences?

• Why not joining. Getting politicians to join is important

  • not enough people in the network
  • UI
  • Monetization

• The cultural vibe is really important

• Scott got quite some input as people actively reach out.

  • one common issue: Social control may make people leave. Hard feedback on not living up to Fediverse cultural standards

• In Mastodon they saw quite some people leaving who then went back to twitter (?!)

• People understand what is wrong with X, but what is wrong with Instagram? This needs an easy narrative.

• A sizable influx of people from twitter was wasted due to (according to some at least) a non-welcoming culture, in particular towards “black twitter”.

• There seems to be a culture on Fediverse that low engagement numbers are a good thing. This may be very untrue for the larger population.

How to get to know the people we want in the Fediverse?

• With the org.basel.social project, Gilles aims to study active Fediversians, but crucially, also inactive accounts: people who got disappointed.

• Another discussion member met with journalist and local politicians about their wishes.

• We should study people aiming to make a segmentation, so that we learn different groups of people with different needs in terms of functionality and narratives.

• For differnt segments of the population, we do not only need various narratives or single functionalities, but also softwares that are focused on one segment.

• For us, the full Fediverse-narrative about empowerment and freedom works, but for others “there is no advertisement” may be better.

What do we want the Fediverse to be?

• Social media vs. social networks:

  • Social media is about publishing to large number of followers (e.g. influencers),
  • social networks about half a dozen people interacting with each other

• We agree that a basic goal is to reduce the harm big tech social media are currently doing to society.

  • If this can be done with the Fediverse, we should do it, also if it would mean the Fediverse is partly “TikTok-like television”.

• Better privacy, “consuming” social media content without being surveilled.

• More control, allowing to interact with a limited circle of people.

• End-to-End encryption should help with the privacy issue

• Bonfire looks to support group that wants to interact internally and have a connection to the outside

What do we think that people want, and how to get there.

• Easier onboarding

• Easier connecting to people and content

• Better ways of making interesting feeds. Local is great, I do want to know what’s happening in town, but I am not necessarily interested in my neighbours opinion about icehockey.