Hey, welcome to another edition of the Independent Creator Podcast.
Tonight we're actually going to slow things down a little bit, take a look at being more
patient and trying to move people from the social networks of everywhere to the Fediverse.
So we're also going to take a look at why bringing everybody to them might not be just
a good idea or might be a bad idea.
Let's talk a little bit more about that later.
Right now we're going to look at why bringing people into the Fediverse is actually good
and bad.
But the point is, is that growth...
Actually let's take it back.
Quick upswings of massive flooding into a Fediverse as we saw back in, what was it,
2020, 2019, 2021 when Elon Musk first took over Twitter at the time.
There was a big massive swale or a wave of people coming into Macedon.
And of course it caused a lot of issues with the servers weren't designed or weren't built
or weren't ready for all these people coming in.
And then servers crashing out, the people being confused and frustrated.
It's like, why?
I had to pick a server?
I can't just click go and post my breakfast?
It's something where the mindset at the time was everybody was so used to centralized networks
like Twitter, Facebook, and they were only associated to that social network feeling
of those old networks to this new and weird way of actually communicating with other people
that essentially they were using a flavor of the Fediverse before, which was email.
Now not going into what is the Fediverse and what is Macedon, stuff like that.
But break it down is if you're using Macedon, it's very similar to how you work with email.
You would create an email, send it to someone that's over on Gmail, they would receive it,
but you have a Hotmail account or MSN, whatever, AOL.
I know you're old if you have an AOL account still.
But anyways, the point is, is that these two groups, these two systems could interrupt
with each other and talk with each other.
You don't have to be a Gmail user to talk to other Gmail users.
It was like that in the past.
We're talking like early days.
But anyways, the point being is that what the Fediverse brings these multiple servers
together and to share communication between them is something that makes the Fediverse
great and what makes it even better is that the people using it are understanding of what
it is capable of and what you can use it for.
So like I mentioned with the people coming in from like Twitter and Facebook, most notably
from Twitter, is that they were associating the Twitter experience into Mastodon, but
were hitting a roadblock.
And what happens is that the people that were associated with the Twitter experience for
the past 20 years, it's kind of hard for someone to just automatically just quickly change
how they go about their lives and how to interact with this new, completely different system.
And that's where we have to be kind of patient with bringing people into the Fediverse.
Now I did post up a couple articles a couple weeks ago or last month going over saying
we do need to be a little bit patient, especially nowadays when everything is just not Twitter
or ex-Twitter as it is called now.
But with Facebook and Meta and Instagram and threads and people just looking for alternatives,
it's kind of, we're again seeing another tsunami coming in that all of these people are trying
to look for alternatives because they've heard from mass media and their friends and family
talking about how Meta is taking all your information, which they have been doing for
20 something years.
But still, the point remains is that we have to work on a system in order to get these
people moved off of the mass media centralized services into a more contained alternative
platform like Mastodon or Blue Sky or PureTube, Owncast, whatever.
A Fediverse that is welcoming and is patient with these people coming in because they themselves
are not going to be patient.
They want results now.
And if they're not going to get those results now, then they're just going to give up and
go back to where they were before, either ex-Twitter or Facebook.
So let's take a look.
I have this up here, is that for this whole thing of being patient with the people that
we're trying to bring into the fold is that start small.
Small steps are the best way to think about it.
I posted up this article here on Two-Ton Waffle is that the best way to go about it with it,
let me start over again, the best way to go about with this is to communicate with your
more tech savvy family members, either your cousin, uncle, sister, niece, nephew, whoever
has the capability to be more tech savvy than let's say your parents or grandparents.
Because as we know, every Thanksgiving or holiday, we are, for us that are tech savvy
and know things, says, "Oh yeah, you know about computers.
Can you fix my computer?
It's not working."
We all felt those frustrations all the time.
But anyways, start with the tech savvy family members.
Let get them associated with the alternative platforms first.
They might be part of the ecosystem, the Fediverse ecosystem to begin with.
And if that's the case, your job is almost halfway over because you can utilize their
experience with your uncles and aunts or your grandparents and parents to try to bring them
over.
But you also have to think about in the back of your mind is that the old saying, you can't
teach an old dog new tricks.
It pretty much plays out here, unfortunately, where let's say with your grandparents, they
have been locked steady in doing one thing or it was hard enough to get them into Facebook.
That took probably years to go through.
And now you want to switch them into Frenica or Goju Social or Macedon.
And the experience for them is not going to be as streamlined as it was for Facebook.
It just flat out isn't.
Most of the Fediverse is designed and built by programmers and the UX and the user experience
and user interface is not as great as it should be.
It should be simpler.
Not to say we should dumb down the experience, but the onboarding experience and Macedon
is working on it a lot.
They've been bringing some people in and trying to work on getting that user, the first user
experience to be a much better experience.
But it's not as forthcoming as Facebook or Twitter made it.
When you first logged in to your account, you're instantly given, you want to follow
these people, click, click, click, click, and off you go.
You're giving people to follow or content to look at, read, and then you go off from
there.
With Macedon, it's completely, you are on your own.
You have to go through and find the content that you are interested in.
And that's the best thing that Macedon is great for that.
Yes, it could be a deterrent for the older generation because they don't understand.
And if they do, it'll take a little bit longer process for them to go through and understand
the processes and the reasoning for this.
And that's again, why you have to be patient.
And again, like I have wrote here is make it easy.
You can create a simple guide that is one page, one pager and go through, especially
with screenshots, definitely includes screenshots because many of the older generation are probably
visual learners, but there are also text-based learners as well.
So you can't just work it to be one thing and not have to look at the other thing.
So use screenshots, recommend a specific instance based on their interest.
Let's say if they like sci-fi movies or anything sci-fi, find a Macedon server that deals with
sci-fi-esque discussions.
That helps break the ice of getting into the Macedon and the Fediverse ecosystem because
they're finding you're pushing them into an ecosystem niche that they're interested in
instead of a general vague, everything is good to go.
So look into that.
Offer to help them set up their account.
Spend like half a day.
Go take them to lunch or have them take you to lunch and say, "Okay, what we're going
to do is slowly walk through in building up your account, following the people that you
will find people that you're going to enjoy following and seeing their content."
Show them how to find their friends.
If their friends are on like Macedon or any other places, help them find that and then
get connected and say, "Hey, reach out to Joe Bob or Mary Sue," and just get those connections
built first and then at a later point in time when they start asking you questions like,
"Oh, how do I post alt text?"
Okay, well, I'll show you how to do that.
Upload your image, hit the button that says alt text or enter alt text and put it in and
just try to get them into a slow progression of using these systems.
And then teach them the basics of boosting and following.
Most of us don't understand or I shouldn't say don't understand but think of not boosting
but hitting a star on a post, especially Macedon as, "Oh, it does nothing."
Well, technically it doesn't but it does tell the original poster that someone has enjoyed
that content, that piece of content, that someone had hit the star.
It's not going to be like hitting like and everybody's going to be like, "Oh, this post
got like 60 bajillion likes.
It must be good," right?
No, it's completely the opposite case.
Who cares about the star?
The only person that cares about the star is the original poster and that's great.
It shows, like I said, shows that someone's cared and say, "Oh, I like this post."
It's even better when you hit that boost to now boost it out to your feed and your network
and that enriches the original post content to a wider net of people looking at things
of your content and to gain interest into that content and say, "Oh, yeah, that's good.
I see more of that."
And then you hit follow and you get a new follower and then it just works out for the
best.
Again, people worry about losing touch with their existing networks and we'll show them
how they can go about it.
Cross post between platforms during a transition.
This is a great thing that you can take your content from Mastodon and share it out to
Facebook or Twitter if you want, if you're still on those platforms.
Do that in order to say, "Hey, I am slowly transitioning from using X or Facebook as
my main primary platform to this new platform and I wish you would join me on this journey."
And if people don't, that's okay.
Who cares?
Each person has their individual likes and dislikes of a platform.
They'll say, "Oh, Mastodon is for nerdy, geeky people and it's very difficult and it's impossible
to use.
There's no one's using it."
Well, okay.
That's your opinion.
Good luck with that.
But again, at least cross post.
So you can get all of my account information, all of my content over here.
I'll still cross post it, but you're not going to get the full enriched experience if you
don't come over to Mastodon.
Use tools like MoaParty to sync your posts.
There's plenty of different...
Buffer is another great thing too.
You can post up links from your Mastodon or from your blog site.
That's even better.
I've talked about this in the past, is create a website or a blog or something that you
can post to your website and then take the link and share that link from there to social
network platforms.
You can do that through Buffer and other platforms, services, I should say as well.
And still keep the old accounts while building the Fediverse presence.
When I first moved over to Mastodon, I did leave my account going.
Especially if you're about two weeks.
Other than that, after that, I said, "You know what?
Kill it.
I'm not coming back here.
I don't care."
I just went ahead and killed it.
Now, many people probably don't want to kill their Twitter account because of the simple
fact that, "Hey, there's so much going on."
Still through X, unfortunately, a lot of brands and large initiatives still use X for some
strange reason.
But that's their initiative and we'll talk about that at a later date.
But anyways, if you still want to have your account there, that is totally your prerogative.
You just have to have the understanding that when people look at that and say, "Oh, you
still support X even though all of the bad stuff that has been going on and is still
continuing to go on and you're associating with that."
You just have to understand that you'll have that connotation tied into your X account.
For example, keep that in mind so you're not hit with a surprise left hook from, "Oh, you're
on X.
You're a Nazi as well."
No, it's just some people and some groups and some companies are taking a lot longer
to figure out where they want to lead their social media team, where they want to go to
find a new home.
It's not a quick turnaround.
So keep that in mind.
Again, like this episode is, be patient.
So that's some of the options.
And you'll find I'll have the link to this article in the description and the show notes
on the podcast here.
So again, like I said, be patient with how people react to your interactions with them
and other people associated on these troublesome platforms, I should say.
Another thing to be patient on is moving people from the live streaming platforms.
I know a lot of people are still loving Twitch.
Don't get me wrong.
Twitch is a great place for the live streaming aspect.
And it has a deeply ingrained culture for, let's just say, chat culture of viewers watching
their favorite streamers over there.
You're not going to get all of your viewers to be able to easily move to another platform,
say YouTube or PeerTube or Beam or Moonbeam or Omecast.
It's going to take a lot of work.
And unfortunately, a lot of your audience is going to stay on Twitch.
So one thing you can try doing is multi streaming.
This is what I do.
I multi stream to Twitch, YouTube, our own cast server, and Beam, and probably redoing
or resetting up our PeerTube live streaming system as well, because we do have a PeerTube
instance.
So I live stream to four to five different places at the same time and make it easier
on myself using social stream, which helps combine a chat from all of these places into
one place.
And usually I'll have the chat right show up right here.
And people on Twitch can see what people on Omecast are saying and vice versa, or from
YouTube to Omecast or from Beam to Twitch.
So it's just one of those things where you have to do a slow transition.
Just not say, okay, starting tomorrow, I'm only streaming on Omecast.
You're saying that to the people on Twitch and people on Twitch would be like, oh, so
you're giving up Twitch.
Okay.
I'll guess I'll find another streamer somewhere.
So you have to do this kind of stuff in stages, long rollout.
We're not talking like maybe a week.
We're talking like months of doing this process over the course of several months.
Say, hey, okay, so we're going to start cutting out the Twitch stream for the next two weeks.
We're just going to be streaming on Omecast.
By that time, hopefully most of your viewers have made the change over to Omecast, which
is a great service and I highly recommend it as an advocate for Omecast.
But again, you're going to have those particular people that are solely within the Twitch bubble.
They will not go anywhere else.
Even if Twitch dies within like tomorrow, they would be extremely upset and they'd be
like, well, I guess I'm not watching anything.
I'll just go watch my usual YouTube videos.
I usually do not understanding that the people that they used to love and their favorite
creators are still streaming, are still making content other places.
They don't care.
It's just the cultural mindset of how Twitch has been ingrained in these viewers' brain
space that that's all they know and that's all they care about.
And that's perfectly fine.
Don't chastise them.
Say, oh, you Twitch peasants, whatever, you know, like the PC master race meme and stuff
like that.
But take some time and set things up.
Say, hey, we're doing an experiment.
Hey, if you want to watch this on ad free without creating a sub or needing a sub, go
watch on Omecast.
And the experience is night and day because you don't need an account for Omecast.
All you do is this, you know, you have your generic name that comes up, especially if
the person who created the instance has set that up or made that determination or they
create names, like a set of names to go through for people who come in and randomly get a
name.
And they can associate a Fediverse account with it.
They don't have to.
They can just, you know, hey, this is who I am.
I'm a flying Valkyrie or whatever, whatever random terms you get.
Just give them the option and slowly get them into knowing about the option every stream.
So for my case, I haven't done it as much, but what I would say to people is say, hey,
thanks for coming in.
Tonight we're going to be playing blah, blah, blah.
You can also watch me ad free, even though Twitch doesn't want you doing that.
You can watch me ad free over on Omecast or on YouTube or a peer tube.
I have several options and the links are right below the player and it's available to you.
If you want to watch on Twitch, great.
That's where you want to watch.
And you can offer, you know, your viewers, your membership, your community, different
options, say, hey, not just, you know, what to add free viewing option, but also we do
stream on Omecast server two other days of the week that we don't normally do on Twitch
is more like a behind the scenes or it's more for, hey, this is something to, you know,
give back to the community and say, hey, thanks.
Thanks for watching over on Omecast.
So it's just come up some different ideas and how to patiently work the system into
your advantage.
And one of the things is that I, I see so many times is that people lambast people that
still use meta or Twitch or YouTube or any of these large corporate type of centralized
platforms.
They lambast them and say, hell, oh, you, you guys suck.
If you're using meta, well, you just love giving away your information.
That kind of thinking, it kind of turns away the people that would potentially want to
take a look at the Fediverse.
All they will see is this a sea of toxicity.
They'd be like, well, I don't want to go over there and get completely harassed and ignored
if I'm using meta or, you know, I'm using X because most of the people I know still
are on X.
And I would like to take a look at, you know, blue sky or, or Macedon, but people over there
saying I'm a inline fan boy, but a lot of people get that mindset of it's a, it's a
tribal mindset.
It's like, oh, I was over here on Macedon is the best people were the best tribe.
And you guys over there on X suck.
And you guys are the lowest of lows.
You're Nazis and you just hate everything.
Quell that, that feeling.
Yes.
Macedon is a better experience overall, but the house as was the old expression, you gather
some, you gather whatever with honey and not use vinegar.
I forget, forgetting exactly how it is.
Let me know what the exact saying is supposed to be in the comments down below.
Love to remember, or I'll probably look it up after this, doing this episode.
But anyways, being the positive force says, yes, we do have an element of negativity,
but the overall experience of Macedon is more positive than what you'll find at where you
are now.
And I understand there are some people as with any kind of place, this is going to be
the negative connotation, the negative people.
This is, you're going to find that anywhere you go.
It's just unfortunate part of being a human and part of the human species.
It sucks.
It's humans suck really.
But as you're trying to be a leader or, you know, to, I don't want to say like a missionary
of the Metaverse, it's just, you know, getting the word out to these places, try to say,
"Hey, give us a chance and be the advocate.
Say, "Hey, if you come across anything, let me know.
I'll try to work with you, see what's going on and try to see if we can take care of that
issue."
And don't try to do that for everybody.
Just take like one or two people under your wing and say, "Hey, show them what is possible
within the Fediverse."
And eventually what's going to happen is that more and more people are going to understand
what's with the Fediverse is and what's it about.
We've already seen cases that, you know, news stories are talking about the Fediverse, Macedon
and Blue Sky and other places like that.
The point is that we have to continue getting the word out and not spin it in a overly positive
note, but to make it seem that this is a viable alternative.
You will have a better experience overall in the long-term than you would in the short-term.
But over the long-term, your mental health state will probably be in a better place.
You won't have to deal with the overly negative and completely vile filth that you deal with
now, especially in advertising and just the accounts that you're getting shoved information
into your account, into your feeds.
So again, this whole episode is just to be patient with everybody.
There is no race.
We have to have a massive number of people using the Fediverse and Blue Sky.
We have to have so many daily active users, more than X and Meta combined by the end of
2025.
And if we don't, the whole system is going to collapse.
No, there is no race.
It's a marathon, not a sprint.
We just want to say this is a viable alternative to what the garbage that you're having to
deal with and take your time.
That's it.
Now, if you know anyone that is actually going through this process and you want to share
their experience with us, do so with the comments or go to our community, our forums at twotonewaffle.forum.
That's the great place or twotonewaffle.com is our main site.
The other articles that I showed on the podcast episode here is all there as well.
So with that, I'd like to say thank you for coming out and be sure to click the like.
Also give a five star rating on Apple Podcasts if you would like to help out.
You know, give a comment, like an emoji.
It's an engagement.
It helps.
But with that, have a good night and later taters.