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)
Totally agree! I’m not 100% opposed to your idea, I’m just not a good sales person so if I tried to convince people on Facebook to move away from that platform, I would most likely end up being seen as a conspiracy theorist or something like that.
Before I left facebook I did post a comment in my feed where I announced I’d be leaving Facebook within a certain time frame and that people could find me this and that place, at this or that email and on the phone if they had my number. Wrote a bit about why I had had enough of Facebook, didn’t make it political, but focused instead on how Facebook no longer felt like a place where I could interact with family and friends, but more like an advertisement platform where I may be lucky to see one or two posts from people I care about inbetween an endless scroll of ads and brainrot content.
My biggest surprise was how quick some of my friends were to reach out to keep in contact and some were eager to move to Signal so we could still talk conveniently in the future (lets face it, text isnt always the most convenient communication form lol). That was a surprise because I literally thought no one would care that I left.
I will do my best to share things like Signal and the European alternatives with people I care about irl and leave the online convincing to the pros xD I could probably spread the word about feddit on reddit since I haven’t deleted my profile yet, just the app. I feel like reddit would be more open to this since more people on there are invested in online communities unlike most people on Meta who just use those platforms to connect with people they know irl already.