There’s a lot of people on here who are part of what I’d call losing causes, causes that run counter to the consumerist capitalist mono-culture, I.e. socialism, veganism, FOSS, anti-car urbanism, even lemmy and the fediverse.
I want to know what made you switch from being a sympathizer to an active participant. I believe it’s important for us to understand what methods work in getting people involved in a movement that may not have any immediate wins to motivate people to join.
EDIT: A lot of people objecting to my use of losing so I’ll explain more, all of these causes benefit from popularity and are weakened by there lack of adoption and are thus in direct competition with the capitalist consumerist mono-culture, a competition which they are currently losing.
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Socialism on a small scale cannot solve the inherent issues of a capitalism that surrounds it.
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Veganism benefits from more people becoming vegan and restaurants and grocery stores providing vegan options.
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FOSS, or more specifically desktop Linux, benefits from more people being on it and software developers designing for and maintaining applications for it.
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The more people that use transit, the more funding it gets and the better it gets.
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the fediverse benefits from more people veing on it and more diverse communities so those with niche interests besides the above causes can find community here.
On the flip side the capitalist consumerist alternatives to all of these benefit from there popularity and thus offer a better value to most people. The question is about what made you defer that better immediate material value in favor of something else.
I understand people making choices despite popularity, it seems a lot of people here are of that category, I’m concerned with the people who are choosing not to join a cause because of its lack of popularity, leading to the issues mentioned above. I think this second group is a larger percentage of the population then the first group. I think we can agree that these causes gaining popularity is good, even though they can have value without popularity. So getting that second group into the cause would be good.
I think what your advocating is to just evangelize the benefits and then people will come. But I think there are a lot of people that even if I could explain every benefit of Linux, they’d still stay on windows citing one of the above benefits of popularity, same with a lot of the causes listed above. If we are to say evangelizing is the best/only method then we leave a lot of those people for which education is not enough.
I was looking for people who were at that point of being educated about a cause, but weighed it it less then those benefits of popularity and continued on in the capitalist consumerist system. Then maybe something else pushed those scales to the other side and they chose to join the cause. What was that experience? Was it having a child? Was it an experience with death, spiritual experience, revelation, drug trip, etc. I guess that’s the question.
I think education about a cause is a continuum, not a binary. When I changed from popular lifeways to less popular ones, it wasn’t because of a road to Damascus moment that made me suddenly change my mind. It was because, as I gradually learned more about a particular topic, I ultimately reached tipping point and decided the perceived benefits of switching to the less popular option outweighed the benefits of sticking with the popular option.
(And I’m using benefits in the broadest sense - being able to feel good about myself for doing the right thing is a benefit that outweighs mere physical or financial gain in a lot of cases.)
The other major factor in my switching, when I think back on it, was the capitalist alternative getting worse. I quit using Google’s search engine, for example, both because I learned more about online privacy and because Google’s searches were providing increasingly shitty results.
I kinda agree with you. Very often people with strong moral convictions (a good thing, in my opinion) believe that evangelizing alone is the only ‘valid’ approach, while popularity and convenience are seen as somehow ‘dirty’. But it is impossible to ignore the reality of how much people in their everyday lives want and need convenience. And when it comes to social media, popularity is inherently important, because people want to hang out where their real life friends hang out too. So convenience and popularity are a material necessity if a cause is not to be a losing cause.