The Fediverse is not a product. It's time to get real about marketing
If projects are going to convince people to try alternatives to Big Tech, they need to do a much better job of explaining why they're better for people who don't care about technical details like protocols and decentralization.
Link: The 'normal' response to the Social Web, by Saskia Welch
A smart, accessible, nuanced piece from Saskia Welch about marketing the open social web, which translates easily to being a piece about marketing any transformative technology.
“Fediverse this, Social Web that, no one cares!
Genuinely, no one cares. And, even if you get them to start caring, they do so in the complete opposite direction we've been heading with our messy, undoubtedly decentralised, marketing.”
When we’re building as part of an open source movement (or any kind of ideological movement), we run the risk of gauging our decisions based on the reactions of the movement itself. It’s easy to say that you can’t build a feature, or talk about your project in a particular way, because the community won’t like it. Fine, but are those people the ones you want to reach? Are you speaking to the converted or trying to find a bigger audience?
Talking to existing believers is fine if you want to gain approval or achieve consensus with collaborators who are already in the tent. It’s next to useless if you want to bring more people in and sell them on why what you’re building is going to make their lives better. It’s also worth saying, as Saskia does, that projects need money to reach sustainability; it’s rare that existing converts are going to be your customers.
Converts are people who want your project to exist because they believe in the cause; they are not necessarily people who want it to exist because they themselves need it. The former group is comforting, but you need to find the latter group in order to survive. And if that group doesn’t exist, your project is dead in the water.
The open social web — the fediverse, the atmosphere, any open standards movement — is not a product. Imagine selling the idea of Bluetooth instead of a great pair of wireless headphones. You set out to buy the headphones; Bluetooth is what makes them useful. Headphones can be designed and targeted for specific groups of people (people who work out, people working at their desk, frequent travelers, etc). If people get used to Bluetooth working seamlessly well, then Bluetooth becomes a feature they look for — but it’s not the thing they look for first.
Really great social media platforms are the product. The underlying standards and tooling are what makes them work. Very few people go to Bluesky for AT Protocol; if AT Protocol then gives them superpowers that genuinely make their lives better, then they might look for other products that support it. Bluesky, Mastodon, Pixelfed, et al are the products. The onus is on them to be better than other social media for people who don’t care about the underlying principles or protocols.