How to Bring More People into the Fediverse? Surveying (to be) Fediversians

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

Participants who chose to record their names here:

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.

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.

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.

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

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.