When trying to convince people to move to Fediverse services, people will often refer to them as “alternatives”, calling Mastodon a Twitter-alternative, PeerTube a YouTube-alternative, etc. But I don’t think this is the most effective approach.
This is a problem I noticed before I even heard of the Fediverse, because FOSS advocates do the same thing.
The issue is that to the average person, THING-alternative just means that if you already have THING, you don’t need it. Or even worse, people will assume it’s an inferior imitator. Most people aren’t looking for “alternatives”. When they adopt new social media it’s in response to trends.
Look at mainstream social media for example. When TikTok appeared as a new video platform, it didn’t call itself a “YouTube alternative”.
So, at a minimum, I would advise not referring to services as “alternatives” but simply “cool new services/apps” and exalting their best features from a user perspective.
I have other thoughts on how to advertise the Fediverse, but I don’t want to make this post too long.
Maybe. We do need to explain in terms people can understand what specific fediverse platforms are for though, and people will understand this best if we describe it in terms of concepts they’re familiar with, such as that something is structured like Twitter, like Facebook, like Reddit, etc.
Perhaps “replacement” works better than “alternative”.
Of course, https://web.archive.org/web/20250811165045/https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Alternative has been a section on the gnu.org website (which is for some reason currently down, hence the archive link) for a long time.
Honestly, I think the best way to bring people is simply to reference (link, screenshot and mention) it elsewhere, so that people realise it’s already established and not just a work in progress.
When we put too much effort into persuasion, it can come across as desperate, which makes people distrustful.
Sharing Fedi content on non-Fedi media seems like it could help. Linking a PeerTube video, or sharing a screenshot of a Mastodon comment (preferably an intelligent one, not a drama-baiting one) could help. Although the direct linking could be difficult since we don’t want to overwhelm anyone’s instance.