Fediverse Spotlight: Connecting Creators and Audiences
Table of Contents
Problem: Platform Inertia Punishes Small Platforms
Network effects are by and far the largest hurdle Fediverse platforms have to overcome. Doing this is more straightforward on microblogging platforms like Mastodon because “content production” is relatively low effort. Sub-500 character posts and replies make up the entire experience, so by simply existing on the platform you’re likely to engage in behaviors that feed it content.
This isn’t the case for every Fediverse platform: take something like PeerTube. PeerTube, being modelled after YouTube, is highly asymmetric in its design: there’s a strict divide between those producing and those consuming the content. Producing videos for PeerTube is a very conscious effort that requires a lot of investment in terms of time and effort.
This results in the self-fulfilling phenomenon of *platform inertia": a platform at rest stays at rest, while a platform in motion stays in motion.
In this vicious cycle, viewers don’t regularly check these platforms because there’s nothing to see, and creators are disincentivized from uploading to these platforms because there’s nobody to see them.
The purpose of a feed is to connect publishers and audiences. Many Fediverse platforms have feeds: PeerTube, PixelFed, Funkwhale, etc. The problem is, having a feed only matters if audiences have built a habit of checking it in the first place. You can’t necessarily rely on this, because that habit only forms when its rewarded: i.e. opening the page and finding new content you like.
But there is a flipside to platform inertia: a push from outside can introduce motion where there previously was none. Conscious strategies can be employed by platform founders in order to “seed” activity in these initial stages.
Laid out below is one of the strategies I have developed and tested in pursuit of this goal.
Theory: Leveraging the Community
Fediverse platforms are not the only platforms that have to deal with this question of how to stir the pot. Web3 social media platforms such as Bitchute and Steemit have relied on either paying creators to move to their platforms or leveraging their cryptocurrency systems to create monetization on content.
This approach is not viable for the Fediverse, which is built from the ground-up on a non-commercial foundation. Either way this might be for the better, as such tactics might guarantee short-term results but fail to lay a solid long-term foundation for a community (just look at what happened to Mixer).
Instead, I think it makes sense to leverage a different asset the Fediverse has: a bunch of strongly ideologically motivated early adopters who can “stir the pot” and offload a lot of the costs of early investment.
Engagement incentivizes uploads, but the rate at which increased engagement correlates to increased motivation isn’t linear. The psychological difference between no engagement and some engagement , is more than marginal gains past that point. If we can seed even a little bit of regular engagement and follows towards users that have chosen to post their content to the Fediverse, that greatly improves our odds of retaining those creators on the platform long-term. It also makes the jump to uploading to the Fediverse less daunting for those on the fence.
Working this out means sketching the contours of what essentially amounts to a decentralized guerilla marketing campaign: find various venues that are trivial for any individual to spin up and create room for the activities in and of themselves to build a sustainable community.
Two suggestions I will lay out in this section are leveraging newsletters and forums. These don’t need to be complex solutions: even in the pre-internet era, they’ve been tried-and-true methods to help build communities and spread ideas.
First, newsletters. Newsletters allow those “pot-stirrers” to manually curate and send out recommendations, even to audiences who don’t regularly check feeds. In the process of curation and drafting up each article, they also provide a level of engagement and connection to the creators they’re reviewing. In turn, the newsletter’s readership is able to be passed on to the creators it digs up.
Newsletters have the benefit of not being network-bound: you can link individual issues on any number of forums, social media accounts, etc. and hijack their pre-built traffic to redirect towards federated networks.
The second suggestion I have is either the establishment of a dedicated self-promotion forum (specifically in the form of a Lemmy/Kbin community) or a set of policy standards whereby pre-existing Lemmy communities can selectively open themselves up to self-promotion.
There’s a lot of people who use Reddit/Reddit-like platforms for self-promotion, and it makes sense: they’re very, very well-designed for that purpose. There’s also a lot of people constantly looking to plug their videos/blog/art/music, and they’re desperate to do it anywhere. Most communities go out of their way to block self-promotion, leaving them with few options in terms of getting people to see their stuff.
We can take advantage of that fact to negotiate terms in which this self-promotion ends up benefitting the Fediverse as a whole. Make sure to set the following ground rules:
- Any content linked must be uploaded to a Fediverse platform. They can upload their content elsewhere too, but the link has to be to the Fediverse-hosted copy.
- Every post promoting your own content has to be matched by exploring and commenting on someone else’s content posted there.
- Potentially also have a rule prohibiting commercial content dependent on how bad it is.
This rewards people for posting on the Fediverse, avoids the place being flooded with spam, and encourages people to actually engage with the community instead of just posting and forgetting about it. People get exposed to stuff they otherwise might’ve never seen, and the Fediverse becomes increasingly networked.
Both of these strategies (especially the forum) benefit from having an initial base to actually seed the activity there, but seeding a basic level of readership to one newsletter or seeding the minimum amount of activity to one forum is a much easier task than doing this for a bunch of creators all separately.
The Fediverse has a tight-knit network of real humans on platforms that aren’t constantly in competition with optimized commercial marketers for the front page. This is the weapon we can use to plow through the early stages of adoption.
Fediverse Spotlight: A Retrospective
From September 2019 to October 2021, I ran a series of issues in a newsletter titled Fediverse Spotlight (see links below). In each issue, I would take a couple minutes out of my day to scroll various Fediverse feeds (PeerTube, Plume, PixelFed), and I would pick out one user which met the following criteria:
- Has interesting content, and isn’t just posting random stuff. This should be something people want to see.
- Isn’t too large, as the point is to give more exposure to where there isn’t much yet.
- Regularly posts. I’m making recommendations to people, I don’t want them to be left to follow someone who stopped posting.
From there, I would begin to write up a short article talking about what the channel does, what I think about it, and then I also provide an interview with the creator in question.
The interview works well in that most of these creators are easy to reach on Mastodon and it gives a personal edge to the newsletter that probably wouldn’t be there otherwise.
I would post these newsletters to Reddit and Fediverse-adjacent communities often, and they got decent traffic. Those early stages went well.
A few issues in, I got an offer to integrate my series into a larger Fediverse newspaper known as WeDistribute, which was back then partnered with FENEAS, a then-rising institutional pillar of the Fediverse. So, I ported over my old articles and spun up a new one, believing getting published would be the next logical step in terms of getting readership.
I think this theory was right, and still holds up even today. Building up a couple of pieces to act as proof-of-concept/demos and then pitching to a smaller, Fediverse-related outlet is probably the direction you would want to take with this. It wasn’t too time-consuming or difficult, which is a good sign to me that this is very easy to replicate by others.
Problem was, WeDistribute was going through some turmoil at the time behind-the-scenes and I often wouldn’t hear back on the status of my submissions for long periods of time. The site eventually went down, and I figured I’d have to cut my losses and go back to self-publishing these.
I put out a couple more, and they were interesting, but I gradually lost interest, since I generally saw this as a side-experiment rather than my main thing.
I think the strategy is still viable, however, I’d definitely want to find someone who’s more willing to regularly commit to this sphere of “Fediverse journalism” to pass the torch to. If you are reading this, and are interested in taking it up, please get in contact with me. If you need any help in the initial stages or help with getting connected to the right people, I can lend it.
I see that WeDistribute is back up and regularly posting again, so I think getting more issues running and then looking to get this series integrated into WeDistribute again is the play.