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.
Have you ever been on a social network under construction? The first people joining are the geeks who talk about geek stuff and the geek stuff now is the fediverse and microservers. It has always been like this.
We don’t need anything. We discuss based on interests. Talking for filling blank space is what led reddit to what it has become.
Don’t be in such a hurry to see your network filled with people talking for the sake of talking. We will come to this point and this will be the moment when we leave.
The fediverse has been like this for years. For… What, a decade? It did not take that long for Reddit users to start talking about their hobbies. I remember a lively community for my undergrad school where people discussed events, classes, student government, the schools’ governance structure, all sorts of shit, that was in… 2012? Very active for a very small niche. Much more active then than /m/nyc is now. Much, much, much more active.
I’m not in a hurry. My mastodon account is six years old, and there’s still nobody there talking about anything, I have found about 12 accounts I wanted to follow — half of them are software projects or software freedom organizations, and half of them are inactive. I go there, put up a post, none of my ~300 followers see it, because none of them check Mastodon, because it’s a complete ghost town.
I’ve been extremely patient. It’s about damn time the fediverse started to happen.
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The fediverse has gone from 0 to 0.4 in the last ~6 months. Again, the fashion communities still don’t exist. The cooking communities are still pretty fucking small. There are not enough animal gifs. People who come here see it as empty, see people all discussing the same narrow range of topics, and leave. There’s nobody to follow on Mastodon. I’ve been on Mastodon, specifically, for over six years. I got really excited when people started talking about it on Twitter, but I still haven’t found more than a dozen accounts, and I still have zero engagement, because the fediverse still barely exists.
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I’m posting on the existing fashion communities I’ve found. I’ve posted plenty about fashion on mastodon as well. It takes more than one person actually doing these things. So here I am, constructively encouraging people who care about the fediverse to use it. I’m sorry you don’t appreciate that.
What you should appreciate is the number of argumented answers you had to your question with so few one liners made of “Dan pleeease”. Followed by the inevitable clickbait articles. This will probably not last.