OK, so I replied to a couple threads, but I’ll put my direct answer here. You have to frame it in terms of something they ALREADY care about, not try get them to care about decentralization.

I’m a non-technical Fedi user. I didn’t give a damn about decentralization or FOSS when I first joined. I only vaguely understood what those things even meant. (I do understand and care now, but that came later after I kept seeing people talk about them in Fedi spaces.)

I joined Lemmy because I cared about getting away from the big tech billionaires, basically. I’m sick of AI and don’t want to use Reddit as long as it’s partially owned by Sam Altman. I wasn’t thinking in terms of joining the Fediverse, I was thinking in terms of “Reddit alternative that doesn’t directly support Sam Altman/OpenAI.” The “choose an instance” thing was a barrier, but that faded after I found out I could change it later and decided to just default to the most popular instance for now.

Your non-technical friends probably don’t care about decentralization (yet), but they might care about:

-Fuck AI companies and the big tech billionaires

-Avoiding psychologically manipulative algorithms that make social media addiction more likely

-More human interactions, fewer ads and bots.

etc.

This part is harder, but you’d need to find communities on here they’d be interested in. I joined when I was thinking about deGoogling, and the thriving tech communities on here appealed to me for that reason even though I wasn’t a techie. This might be easier with a different part of the Fediverse, depending on the person’s interests. Lots of creative people of all stripes are on Mastodon, for instance.

Maybe don’t explain the Fediverse. If they dislike AI, just say you use a Reddit alternative that isn’t partially owned by Sam Altman. If they’re concerned about being addicted to Instagram, say you use an Instagram alternative without the addictive algorithms.

Yeah, Lemmy/Fediverse has a very specific brand of niche and very few others. I’m missing those book/media-related communities here too. Fedi needs more niches.

I hope not. Surely we can come up with other ways to help people easily find stuff they like.

Yeah, this is smart. If we get more thriving communities for different interests groups, more people will want to come and stay in the Fediverse. And that naturally lends itself to getting your friends to join, too, because some of them probably share those interests.

I don’t think naming it “Fediverse” would help much. The Fediverse is already a confusing concept for a lot of people, while “better version of Instagram called Pixelfed” is more straightforward. I think the best bet might be to improve the UX on the official Mastodon app, make an official Lemmy app named Lemmy, etc. Have “make an account” default to the largest instance, but have a “choose a different instance” option in smaller font as well, complete with a question mark button that gives people a VERY brief explanation of what an instance is, reassures them that they don’t need to worry about it right now, and mentions that they can change it later. This might be tricky on Lemmy in particular, as the flagship instance from the lead devs is controversial and no longer the most popular one, but might work better on other Fedi platforms.

I kind of agree with the rest of this though. The Fediverse simply lacks most of the celebs, interesting people, and dopamine-providing stuff that mainstream social media has. You’d probably need to do some kind of big PR campaign where celebs talk about moving to Fedi platforms (and have them, you know, actually be on here.) Make a big cultural movement where all the cool kids are moving to Mastodon. I’d like to hope you could bring in some excitement without the kinds of shitty, manipulative algorithms that the big platforms have. But it probably would help to make it somehow easier to find interesting/fun/engaging stuff. You might need a more Reddit-style setup where you select some interests and it points you to related communities or hashtags that are popular on your instance or something.

Yeah, I’m also a not-very-technical user and I feel this. Fedi is great if I have a tech question or very general human question, but I miss seeing thriving online communities around some of my interests. The people organizing cool offline activities I want to participate in simply aren’t on here. My family’s not here, either. All of those are pretty important “social” aspects of social media that the Fediverse lacks.

I’m kinda baffled at the low-userbase-is-a-feature people. If decentralization and FOSS are so inherently wonderful and this kind of social media is so much healthier, wouldn’t you want all your friends and family to benefit from that? Don’t you want society as a whole to leave toxic algorithms behind and stop consolidating tech power in creepy dudes’ hands?

Yeah, the Fediverse needs different ways to promote itself. Very few people give a flying flip about decentralization or open source, but some people might be interested in:

-Giving less power to Sam Altman (partial owner of Reddit), Zuck, Musk et. al

-Not having everything you post directly given to OpenAI for AI training

-Lack of psychologically manipulative algorithms

-Fewer ads

-Different moderation, maybe (if someone has had issues with being threatened on Xitter or having posts auto-removed somewhere or something)

-More human interactions

You’re still not going to get most people to move over based on those things, but you might get more.

Dang, we really should have learned about him in school. Talk about impact, and he even had a memorable name.

Hate to day it, but every industry has turned into that. At least in my anecdotal experience and my network’s anecdotal experience, useless people using AI to create shit that means extra work for others is happening everywhere. Not saying you should stay in manufacturing if you hate it, but just be aware that you probably won’t be leaving that issue behind.

political opinions that differ from what?

Yeah, I keep having to remind myself of that. Healthier tech is less convenient and not automatically tailored to our interests/desires by design. More convenience and automatic personalization means more psychological manipulation (at best, into spending more time on the platform so you will see more ads), as well as more data collection and less privacy.

I used to think I was a pragmatic person. Decades later, not so much.

I’m kind of skeptical of pragmatism. Pragmatism too often leads people and businesses to do things that contribute to enshittification, marginalization of various social groups, and other social ills. Every time something gets worse, it’s probably because of someone’s “pragmatic” decision. There’s some value in being pragmatic in a lot of situations, but I think other values have to take precedence. If you put pragmatism first every time, you’re going to end up hurting people and adding to all the BS people live with.

I don’t quite agree. What you say won’t instantly change someone’s mind, but it plants a seed, sometimes even if the person seems to be doubling down hard.

When I’ve changed my mind about important things, it usually wasn’t because of one conversation. It was more like 100 conversations and articles that slowly built up doubt until one more point tipped me over. None of those individual conversations would have seemed to make a difference to the other person, but they ultimately contributed to me changing my mind.

Social norms, basically. I have unusual ideals about some important but very personal aspects of a relationship. Talking about those aspects early on is seen as a red flag in my community, but not talking about them means we’re probably wasting each other’s time.

You could probably get around this with the right dating apps, but those are data privacy nightmares.

I don’t quite believe in that stuff, but it’s a fun way to think about all the positive coincidences in your life and maybe let go of anger about negative situations you can’t change.

Sir, this is Lemmy.

But seriously, we’re on a social media platform that is all about decentralization. Of course a lot of people here dislike the idea of a single world government, for all the reasons already mentioned and more. Everything we dislike about centralized social media platforms would be present at a much greater level in a single world government.

I found out that the $130 name brand of a particular item lasted about 10x longer than the $35 no-name equivalent. Someone who’s pretty thrifty helped point me toward the brand. If part of what you’re paying for is sturdier materials and build, it might be well worth the extra cost.

For most things though, it’s not worth the price as far as I can tell. Nobody really cares if you wear no-name clothing, or if they do, they’re an asshole you want to avoid anyway.

Some search engine results are crap, yes. But even the worse search engine (minus AI overviews or whatever) gives you a setup where: (1) each piece of information has an actual source, (2) you know who the source is, and (3) you can make decisions about which information to trust accordingly. If a popular search engine puts a sketchy company’s blog at the top of the SERP, you can actually see that and choose to look father down for something more reliable. Also, if your current search engine keeps failing you, try a different one! There are many options out there that you might find more helpful than today’s Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo.

Good luck with things, truly. I think you’re going to get hurt eventually if you use LLMs for medical advice, and I genuinely don’t want that for you or anyone. Hopefully this conversation has at least made you a little more skeptical about using LLMs in certain ways.

You can teach people how to use it all day long, but most still won’t use it well consistently in real life. Humans instinctively trust confident-sounding language. Most of us are also way worse at fact checking than we think. LLMs play right into humanity’s flaws, and they’re built to maximize engagement rather than help us avoid going past the tools’ limits. I don’t trust LLMs to be accurate about anything, but I still caught myself reading and failing to check Google AI overviews sometimes before I changed my default search engine to a no-AI alternative. It’s just instinctual when an “answer” is right there at the top of the page in response to your search question.

Sure, you can use an LLM to help you find sources, but at that point you might as well just use a search engine. There are search engines that provide links with actual text from each site rather than potentially hallucinated summaries.