Crazy thing is so many people still don't get it, even while they complain. Even people who fled reddit to lemmy complain about people on Lemmy talking about defederating threads, acting like people are overreacting.
The annoying thing to me is that it's taken a further 13 years to reach a point where another social network is feasible.
I'm not saying there haven't been attempts like diaspora and the early mastadon etc, but now we're actually reaching a critical mass of participants where a move is worth it.The same is true of Signal. I've been using it for nearly a decade, but it's only in the last 2 years that people haven't rolled their eyes when I mention it's my preferred comms app.
I feel this. A couple years ago I decided you either get me on signal or SMS, I lost contact with a lot of people after that, but seeing my contacts slowly join and having people slowly start to accept it as a viable messaging app is a good feeling
You should check out matrix. I had it on my todo list for like 2 years and finally gave it a shot. They have a federated model for communities, interoperability, self hosted servers for data retention/ownership and a big one is the platform bridges. It kind of seems like the next step in IM that social media has taken as of late.
It's definitely in part that the only marketing open source services do is "your weird computer nerd friend evangelizing" what is so baffling to me is that even my friends who are very anti-corporate left leaning won't jump off corporate services even if I offer to host for them, I'd happily host lemmy, mumble, etc. So they can get off corporate apps but they're completely uninterested.
There's always a relevant XKCD
