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How do we get "normies" to adopt the Fediverse?

This is a follow-up from my previous thread.

The thread discussed the question of why people tend to choose proprietary microblogging platfroms (i.e. Bluesky or Threads) over the free and open source microblogging platform, Mastodon.

The reasons, summarised by @[email protected] are:

  1. marketing
  2. not having to pick the instance when registering
  3. people who have experienced Mastodon's hermetic culture discouraging others from joining
  4. algorithms helping discover people and content to follow
  5. marketing

and I'm saying that as a firm Mastodon user and believer.

Now that we know why people move to proprietary microblogging platforms, we can also produce methods to counter this.

How do we get "normies" to adopt the Fediverse?

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  • @dch82 first, "normies" have to not get harassed when they come here.

    Unfortunately the biggest Fedi software refuses to add automated reporting of offensive posts so if it's not reported, the admins won't even see it.

    People coming from corporate social media are used to ignoring the report button because in their experience, it either doesn't work, or gets ignored by admins anyway.

    We need automated reporting.

    @fediverse

    • We need automated reporting.

      I'm fine with auto REPORTING, but the actual moderation needs to be a human. Auto moderation is bad. It gets things wrong. It's how I got banned from both twitter (calm down, this was back in 2018 before it was an elon owned nazi cesspool), and reddit.

      On twitter I saw a funny video that was posted, and I replied "Aw man, that killed me".

      I was banned for "inciting death threats"

    • Federated reporting would help too

    • @[email protected] @[email protected] Maybe im a little lost. Isn't there a block and report button on Mastodon? I'm using Misskey and both buttons seem to work. I mean im reporting to myself, but the button seems to work. What kind of automated blocking are you trying to do here?

    • Definitely. Back when I used FB and Twitter I learned that reporting is entirely useless. You just end up with some automated message about how they reviewed it and it "didn't violate their community standards" with some lame verbiage like "we realize this isn't the outcome you were looking for", regardless of how ridiculously blatant whatever you reported was. On the flip side, I was banned for clearly misinterpreted or brigaded comments, and then an appeal just gives you the inverse where they reviewed it and whatever you posted was definitely terrible and they "realize this isn't the outcome you were looking for".

    • We have instancewide admin blocks, so the accounts that would be automatically reported can be blocked preemptively, no report needed. That can be both good and bad... but pick a sheltered instance and you shouldn't get harassed. How would automatic reporting even work? I don't recall, but doesn't the admin interface let you specify keywords that alert the admins in a post? Is that what you mean?

      CC: @[email protected] @[email protected]

    • I unironically think it would be easier to train users that the report button works now than it would to get automated reporting that was worth a damn implemented.

    • By automated reporting do you mean something like filters on the backend to flag offensive posts per some custom settings?

169 comments