Inviting & guiding others to the fediverse

When you step outside the fediverse and try to talk to others about it on corporate platforms, chances are you'll either get, "Yeah that's too complicated" or "Isn't it full of [insert bad people here]?" or some variation thereof, at least if they've heard of it at all. A lot of this comes down to communication or messaging failures.

Some of those trying to invite others are excited by the new place they've found & its tech, but they don't entirely understand it or they kinda do & mistakenly think others might be too & try to talk both the community & the tech up (or just the tech) and completely miss their mark. The people they were hoping to invite are now more put off & think their community is full of similar folks, and at its worst they may think it sounds a little like all the cryptocurrency/NFT-bros trying to promote their crap.

So, how might we work around this? Following are my thoughts, but I'd like to read yours as well.

First: try to know a little about who you're talking with/to. This is how you figure out whether to try to invite them at all, and if so, how to go about it without rapidly losing their interest & turning them away from the entire idea. This is easier with friends & acquaintances, of course, but for strangers...

Well, try striking up conversations on posts where your interests intersect and/or platform dissatisfaction is expressed & if interest in another social platform comes up, bring it up that way. Don't try to force the subject, that's what drives folks away.

Second: forget the tech backends. The tech doesn't matter to the vast majority of the folks we might like here. It's cool, and interesting to some of us, but most folks? They don't care. One of the biggest mistakes Mastodon & Lemmy instances/sites have made is to put the tech upfront over the communities they're aspiring to cultivate.

Other community sites didn't build themselves up like that, and frankly, neither should we. So when you're trying to invite folks over, invite them on the basis of your instance/site's community culture and secondarily the formatting/structure, e.g. it looks like Reddit/Twitter/etc. but without ads & annoying algorithms.

Third: if they're your friends or acquaintances or just someone expressing some curiosity about the space, invite them to your instance. Don't give them choice paralysis by pointing them to a list of servers like on join Lemmy or Mastodon.

Pointing them there is like telling someone to check out forums and giving them a large loosely organized list of forums to pick one of & join. Very few would go from there & sign up to give one a try, and even then they're likely to bounce off from unfamiliarity & not knowing anyone there and what they even want to post to strangers.

Those are just a few of my thoughts though, what about you?

TL;DR: know your audience, pitch your community not the tech, invite them to your community instance & don't point them to a big list of instances.