Please, put the pitchforks and torches down. Hear me out.

You (yes, you!) are a front-runner. You are a first-mover. You came to the fediverse while most people don’t even know it’s a thing.

In the last couple of weeks/months, there’s been an increasing sentiment to boycott the established social media (Facebook, Xitter, Reddit, etc.), due to their rollback of fact-checking and hate speech protection. This has resulted in a lot of new users for a lot of instances lately.

Feddit.dk has gotten over 50 new users in the past few weeks, which is about a +50% increase of the monthly active users, a big deal for a small instance like ours.

This is a great opportunity to teach others about the fediverse and get more people to move to a more democratic, sustainable internet. But all these potential users are still on the corporate social media - we can’t reach them unless we are there!

You, the first-mover, is exactly the kind of person we need to stay on Facebook, just for a while, to guide people over to the fediverse. Feddit.dk was actually posted in a Facebook group a few weeks back and we got a few users that way! We’ve also gotten a lot of users via Reddit recently, as people on /r/Denmark have been mentioning Feddit.dk. Guiding people from corporate social media to the fediverse has been the most successful way to get more users so far.

We can’t get second-movers if the first-movers leave everyone behind. So maybe, consider not deleting your Facebook or Reddit account just yet, and if you don’t, try to look out for people that are looking for alternatives. You can be their guide.

(and if you want to delete Facebook regardless, I totally respect that choice btw)

  • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.uk
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    15 hours ago

    I’m largely still on Reddit to direct people towards the fire exits.

    I did have a chat with someone about getting off Facebook and they reckoned they could get the majority of friends and family off Facebook onto Friendica but would struggle to give up Messenger and Marketplace. I pointed them to Matrix and Flohmarkt but also appreciated that it might not be possible to make a clean break but the important thing was to get at least one foot out of the Big Web even if they aren’t fully out yet.