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)

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago (1 children)

OP I appreciate the reasoning.
But I'd advise against it,
and would recommend users to delete their Facebook account asap.

Why? 4-5 years ago I already noticed the "illusion of free speech" on Facebook.

The platform is a data farm,
but I'm a data privacy advocate,
so I regularly posted data privacy articles/tools.

Which went against the best interest of Facebook, so they simply held back that content from nearly everyone's feed, resulting in it getting nearly zero attention.

But if I posted a dumb meme,
it would get a lot of attention.

I've asked around to friends back in the day who where scrolling online if they saw my data privacy posts, none did.

So staying on the platform to advertise things that go against Facebooks best interest, will likely not yield good results.

However deleting your account,
is a great conversation starter that can easily be directed into WOM (Word of Mouth) marketing, to teach your friends and family about Fediverse tools.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

It is a matter of engagement. People like engaging with dumb meme more than data privacy stuff. Especially when people don't understand the ramifications of poor data privacy or understand fundamentally what the even means. Heck, even I don't understand what companies harvesting my data will mean for my personal life. I am guilty of ignoring data privacy posts in favour of dumb memes too.

It sucks, but thats why the term edu-tainment was coined. To educate people, you must also entertain them.