Was nerver a big social media person, never really posted or interacted with a personal account on intagram,Facebook etc. When I, a couple of years ago, began filming and documenting my creations. I made a bunch of social media accounts on basically all the platforms(because thats what you are supposed to do). Got some followers, never in the thousands or even hundreds for that matter. But I figured it’s probably because I’m not trying to click-bait or follow the latest trends. I wanted to be genuine, still am. But the interactions often times felt like bots. A couple of Smiley’s, a like. Someone followed then never again an interaction with a post. I did set out to make things because I love making things and learning new skills, but got lost on the way. The lower the effort my post had the more interactions. 50-minute video of a woodworking project from start to finish with voice over and explanations, 10 views. 15 second video of a toy car rolling on a track, 2500 views.

And the incessant, follow for follow trends by grifters.

Dead internet theory rang in my head.

I missed the old internet and began dreaming about setting up my on forum with no bots allowed, like in the old days(Yes I’m old enough to remember). Then I learned that mastodon was part of the fediverse, but I had never heard of the fediverse, and mastodon I thought was like twitter for sysadmins.

I’ve almost completely transitioned to the fediverse now. I have yet to delete my YouTube account, but I now also have a peertube channel.

I’ve seen posts about It being hard to get followers on the fediverse, and mastodon. But I’d gladly post to the the ether, if that one in 50 posts is an actual human responding or liking what I do.

Thanks for reading.

  • balsoft@lemmy.ml
    101·
    2 days ago

    Cool!

    However,

    1. Plenty of bots here too
    2. The reason “low-effort” posts get more views/attention than “high-effort” ones is that humans have a limited attention span and everything is trying to grab it (ads, your phone, etc) to extract money out of it. Committing an hour of your life to watch a long high-quality video and learning something from it requires a lot more concentration and willpower than watching 60 1-minute short videos and laughing at each one - and ad interruptions are not as noticeable. It’s not necessarily a bot problem, more of an attention span/capitalism problem. This will also be the case in the Fediverse, to some extent, although likely less because there’s no monetization incentive.