Isolated as in only used by a specific region or culture. So in Weibo’s case, only in China with little connection to other countries. Another example would be 2Go, which was quite popular in Africa for years, but unlikely be to be known from anyone outside the region.
Stuff like Weibo are what I was refering to when I was saying more isolated platforms. A lot of regions have their own smaller social media platforms dominated by one or two cultures. As for Instagram and Facebook, those two are largely world-wide but often (again, massive generalization) less ubiquitous compared to social media in the west.
Social media in general (as we think of it) is much more popular in western nations. Thats not to say those outside the west don’t use social media, but it tends to be much more dominated by group-chats (IE WhatsApp, Telegram) and by more isolated platforms or sections of platforms. Of the social media platforms we’ll be familiar with, it tends to be mostly just the most popular and established ones like Instagram, Facebook, and now Tiktok, rather than something still relatively niche and nerdy like Reddit (nonetheless Lemmy).
All that said, again, this is a massive oversimplification talking broadly about trends. We’re talking about thousands of different cultures in entirely different countries and enviroments.
The main thing is post more. Lack of content is the main reason people don’t use Lemmy more, and the only way to fix this is to share/produce more.
Its a bit of an unpopular opinion, but I think even (transparent, community-relevant) bots are a good idea at this point, given that 99% of interests have little to no activity currently. For example, if we had bots that post game update changelogs to their relevant communities, it would at least provide a baseline amount of content and make it easier to discuss for fans of those games.
So you’re asking how to encourage them to avoid you? Mostly, as you implied, you don’t want to suprise them. When you’re in the area, try and stay in the open, and if you can, make a bit of noise like whistling or that. They’ll naturally want to stay away where possible.
And after hours of troubleshooting, you give in and join the Discord where you’re promptly ignored.
Or if you’re really lucky, people are willing to help, so you spend hours more troubleshooting, often repeating many of the same steps, only for all of them to give up too. (As was my experience when I tried to switch to Linux Mint.)