Leveraging Cultural Momentum (e.g. Solarpunk Trending) to Attract Fediverse Adoption

Convener: Georgia Mountford-Blake (@georgiagemo@mastodon.social)

Notes

• More people are aware of the problems (eg wikipedia pageviews for “doomscrolling” up 5.7x and for “dark patterns” up 3x between 2020 and 2025, also “digital independence” “solarpunk” and “right to repair” all saw significant growth in Google Trends from 2024-2026) however the corresponding solutions have much less visibility - what can we do to meet people where they are at?

• Lexi - people want/need a helping hand, dont know where to start, even activists who hate big tech are finding it too hard to figure out and use

• “This isn’t an alternative to Facebook, it’s a community garden” - Georgia

• Samir - don’t ask people to migrate but to instead to use both, this way the content is there for the people who do try adopting fediverse

• Issue with gatekeeping of older members who dont welcome newbies, especially around certain conversations topics

• Liam - additional capabilities you get on the Fediverse: website, ownership of data, ownership of domain

• Kirsten - help the creators on corp platforms that you follow, and who are complaining about the downward slide of their experience there, start cross-posting to the the fedi (like YouTube -> Peertube). OFfer to lead workshops at your local library about how to set up your own music server, family social network, etc.

• There is appetite for curated content. Anyonymous suggests find people like Cocarnage creating reciprocal communities…

• Things people are annoyed with or want to avoid (ie pain points for which Open Social Web provides some solutions) - enshittification, rising subscription costs, AI slop, work being scraped for training, being shadowbanned or suppressed in the feeds, restrictions on linking out

Key takeaways

The Fediverse has a lot going for it: you own your audience, your content and your identity, and Big Tech has less say over what you see and do. But for most people it’s still too much work.

What’s getting in the way

• New users sign up and find no algorithm and no obvious place to start. Without an early reward, no habit forms and they don’t come back.

• “Big Tech sucks” isn’t enough of a selling point. People can hate the surveillance and still decide the alternative sounds like too much effort.

• Creators see another account and another platform to feed, even when the engagement is good.

• Some existing users give newcomers a hard time for coming from mainstream platforms, and those are the people the network needs.

What might help

• Instead of asking people to switch, encourage them to use both and cross-post, so their content is already there when others arrive.

• Start with groups already being pushed out of mainstream platforms and creators already complaining about them.

• Offer hands-on help through meetups, library workshops and getting existing Discord groups set up.

• Build simpler tools and borrow what works on mainstream platforms.

• Spend less effort convincing people to care about decentralisation and more on making the better option easy to join and worth coming back to.