Iāve never understood how or why this is an issue.
Shortly after Spezās petulant AMA, I ran across a link for Lemmy. org. It looked interesting, so I followed it. I poked around a bit, and it still looked interesting, so I picked an instance and created an account. I played with it a bit, then I went back and found a different instance that looked interesting and created an account there too. And I just kept reading and posting, just like Iād done on Reddit (and half a dozen different sites before that). Some instances came and went and I lost some accounts and created others and eventually settled into a few that I like best, and just read and posted and didnāt leave. The end.
But it seems that every time I turn around, someoneās going on about the hardships of moving to a different site and all the difficulties to be overcome and yadda yadda yadda, and I just donāt get it. At all.
Iāve been trying for weeks to get friends to move to Signal. They donāt have to delete WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger to use Signal. Some of these people have got degrees in various computer disciplines and still wonāt even give it a try. I donāt understand the reluctance to try new software either. If their job or uni asks them to use a piece of software theyāll try it no bother but if a friend asks itās impossible. Itās so strange.
Their life would be easier if you didnāt use Signal, simple as.
I donāt agree with it, but thatās the reason.
Thereās an xkcd about this: https://xkcd.com/1810/
As the only Android user in a social group of iPhone users I felt this way too much.
Same here. About 25% have picked up Signal, the others havenāt. Even though, like you say, they donāt have to drop WhatsApp to get Signal. They arenāt mutually exclusive.
And thereās no rhyme or reason for who starts using Signal. Some of my most tech-illiterate friends jumped on it, because they were sick of Facebook and Meta. As Iāve if them said: itās not at all difficult to start using it. So itās all about motivation.
It didnāt help that there are several other similar spots or there, like Viber. So some people who have multiple already installed donāt want to get yet another. I get that. But Signal is such a solid and unobtrusive app
Thereās an easy solution for that.
F em.
I did that back in 2015 when I moved to discord for my primary social platform. āI am am leaving Skype and Facebook, anyone who wants to reach me can do so at discordnameā
Did all my friends move? No, did I lose anything of value doing so anyway? Also no. The people who still wanted to message me either reached out to my family or myself for a phone number, or added me on discord.
You donāt need all your friends to follow, what you need is enough people to leave the platform anyway that more people use that than other platforms in your friend group. Thatās why Skype died as fast as it did, a combination of instability and enough people deciding they didnāt care who they left behind and just went to discord anyway.
For the case of your job or school you either use what is required or you need to find another job or school. That might not be popular but itās the reality. Other relationships donāt have that kind of pull. Maybe RCS could fix some of it but given what happened with XMPP Iām doubtful.
Iāve had some luck getting some of my people to switch over by asking them to switch as a favor to me specifically (if they want to of courseā¦ And they can always just not use it if they end up not liking it).
Asking them in a more direct way like this seems to work, even if thereās some reluctance at first. I tell them that it helps me out because I can also send stuff to them on my computer, which is true. Then thereās the fact that I just really like all of the extra features it has (itās just a really good chat app in general), emoji replies, reply quotes, and read receipts to name a few.
If they need any other reasons, the last things I tend to get into are the privacy/security aspects.
Boom, all of a sudden theyāre using something better, and even though theyāre probably still using those other (shit) apps, at least I donāt have to. You have to start somewhere, right?
If their job or uni asks them to use a piece of software theyāll try it no bother but if a friend asks itās impossible.
normie and/or bootlicker mind set.
Daddy asked me to do this, so obviously it is right and proper
My friend asked me to use Signal due to āprivacyā, I think he roof is starting to leak again, give him lip service and continue using whatapps as the āsmartā move.
The problem is community.
Lemmy doesnāt fill every hole that reddit filled. There are a lot of industry and hobby subs that just donāt have the audience here. Especially the more niche ones.
Shitposting and memesā¦yeah, we got that in spades. But thatās not what keeps people coming. You can get top-notch shitposts anywhere.
My subscribeds here are dead. I canāt find direct matches for communities I have in reddit, and I have no interest (let alone time) in modding one.
That is a critical mass thing. Reddit 15 years ago didnāt have a thriving pokemon community either. Things grow naturally over time. I think Lemmy is in a good place :)
But, for example, on Reddit there is r/hockey and a sub for each team. On Lemmy those team subs are graveyards, but if you post on c/hockey you might get enough traction to have a conversation. Find the larger community and help grow that first before fracturing to smaller ones.
Yeah I suppose. I came on to reddit early, before there even were subreddits, and comparing young Lemmy to an over-the-hill reddit isnāt a fair comparison.
Still feels like Lemmy tries to be a drop-in replacement for Reddit (sent from Boost for Lemmy), and it really canāt be until it sees much, much more growth.
I think it depends on how you use those different sites
I transitioned from Reddit to Lemmy pretty seamlessly like you did. Around the time it became clear they werenāt backing down on the API thing and other bullshit, I looked up some reddit alternatives, chose Lemmy, and kept right on doing what I was doing on Reddit.
On the other hand, Iām having a bit of a hard time ditching Facebook.
The difference is I know the people Iām friends with on Facebook, I have actual relationships with them, Iām there to interact with those specific people. Leaving Facebook without finding a decent alternative and getting those people to switch with me (which probably means theyād also have to convince their other friends to switch too) means losing contact with those people.
On Reddit and now Lemmy, Iām basically here to read articles and have conversations with strangers about those articles. I donāt really form lasting relationships here, I donāt recognize usernames outside of maybe 2 or 3 big names. If they werenāt full of the worst kinds of idiots, trolls, bots, and scammers I could pretty much get what Iām looking for from the comment section on a news site.
Some people do build those kinds of relationships here though, they come to Reddit or Lemmy, at least in part, to interact with specific users and communities that they have some sort of connection to, and when you have connections like that, it gets pretty hard to leave that platform. Unless all of your friends leave at the same time and go to the same platform, you need to either lose some friends, split your time between the two platforms (neither of which may be as good as what you had because not everyone is there) or you have to find some other way of staying in touch and keeping the friendship going (which is often much easier said than done)
A lot of people donāt seem to get that social media services are almost entirely about their userbases, not their companies. Facebook and Meta are unbelievably terrible, but that is where most of the people you know can be found. Switching to something else is easy, but pointless, if your reason for being there is the people.
I have slowly convinced friends and family to begin using MeWe, but only a small number. And most of them still primarily use Facebook. At least recent events are pushing a few more away from it.
Most peopleās relationship with any given corporate / algorithm driven social media platform is akin to a drug addict.
Start viewing people who canāt imagine quitting cold turkey as drug addicts, and it makes a lot more sense.
This is what happens when corpos have oodles and oodles from data on how to drive āengagementāā¦ and then they do that, via algorithmic content feeds and dark patterns and other kinds of manipulation.
These people are addicted to convenience, to the dopamine hits, to the rage bait, to their validating echo chambers.
They donāt care that it makes them stupid, misinformed, angry, takes all their time, ruins their attention span, makes them feel like ugly failures amidst a sea of beautiful, rich influencers.
If you canāt stop āvoluntarilyā doing something thatās bad for you without a giant fuss, without needing a guided intervention, youāre an addict.
Yeah, butā¦
Having experienced and overcome actual addiction, metaphorical quasi-addictions like social media have never been a challenge. Yeah, thereās a sort of stimulus/reward feedback look, and the sites are structured to encourage compulsive use, but Iāve never spent a week in bed feeling like Iām going to die when stopping. And some substances I was fortunate enough not to get hooked on, such as benzos and alcohol, are even more deadly: they can literally kill you if you try quitting without medical support and supervision. You wonāt die of seizures when quitting Xitter. At worst, you might try finding something else to waste your time doing.
I was on reddit for several years. One day I started getting hit with bans for nothing because one of the mods had it in for me. Thereās no way to win in such a situation. So I replaced the text of every post and comment in every alt with lorem ipsum, then walked away. Nothing of value was lost and I donāt miss it. Lenny is fine, and in the instance Iām in, the mods arenāt power-mad zero-tolerance assholes.
Quitting Facebook was similar. Again, I replaced all the content Iād ever posted on the site with gibberish before leaving. Iāve kept my account, but donāt use it. The elderly relatives I used to keep in touch with on FB have mostly died, and I told everyone else who mattered how they can find me. That part didnāt take long. It was, however, interesting how much dark-pattern bullshit Meta throws in your path when you attempt to disengage.
And if Lemmy and other less toxic social media werenāt there, Iād just do other things. Nobody needs social media, anymore than anyone needs cigarettes.
Itās relatively easy to quit things like Reddit. Thereās no attachments to anything, and the content is mostly links to other sites.
When you have followers and follow specific accounts for the content, users are less inclined to leave unless those they follow and their own followers also leave.
Consider that we live in a world where Trump was elected twice and youāll start to get an idea of what the issue is
Your life must be hard now, right? At every corner of every street, at every TV station, in the faces of others you must see the guy that you hate and you canāt do anything about it.
Extremely well written!
Most people simply donāt care or if they do they donāt need others to care. And then there are the people that want to change something and expect others to do the same, then being surprised they have their own opinions. The next step is of course to rant about it to other random people on the internet just so they can get a confirmation that they are not the problem ĀÆā \ā _ā (ā ćā )ā _ā /ā ĀÆ
Being on lemmy at all is going to come with huge confirmation biases.
Something to consider is that most of these issues with common social media are intangible at best and straight up invisible at worst for most users.
Most people donāt care strongly enough about any of these apps or websites to be bothered. Go ask strangers on the street what they think of spezās this or that and they will say āwhoās spezā followed by, āoh, I donāt really careā.
