With the recent happenings in the United States, the dangers of the privately owned Internet is more apparent than ever, and frankly, it's scary. And so I'd like to make a simple request to anyone who is reading this;
Please use the Fediverse, just a little more.
I personally hate it when I'm stuck having to visit say, YouTube or Reddit to get information, or to entertain myself in quiet moments, and if you're reading this, the likely chance is you're the same.
All I want to ask of you is to just comment a few more times, press send on that post that you felt wasn't of enough substance to be worth anyone's time. We have such a small community compared to everywhere else, but what we do have in common is that, in the grand scheme of things, we are the early adopters. And if we take that to heart and make this space a little bigger, maybe it will be just big enough we won't have to visit walled gardens so often.
Recently I've been thinking about what the internet was like in the 90s. Back when there was no social media. Maybe we should all return to forums and BBSs.
This and the level of free speech that came with it is really needed right now. I don't mean free speech in a go tell someone you disagree with to fuck their aunt type of way. I mean having real deep hard conversations about organizing and enabling movements. It feels like the Internet is scared of that because of monetization and content policies that have chopped the balls off of any form of organization or resistance. Like there's so much shit I wish I could say but some mod policy kills it with a pinned post at the top of the comment section before I can even begin typing out my thoughts.
Just joined and the community already seems pretty vibrant. It honestly doesn't feel that different from Reddit in that regard which is perfect. Reddit and the rest of them can fuck off
You're not shy, you're just a normally adjusted human.
It's normal to want to avoid being abused and insulted for, say, having an opinion which is marginally different to the in-group consensus. But unfortunately that's what happens when we post on text-based social media. Apparently the medium does something to people's minds, turning them into nasty vindictive unpleasant versions of themselves.
I'm a pretty self-confident person in real life and even I think twice about posting anything here that contradicts the prevailing groupthink. The inevitable insults and abuse and mockery are sometimes just not worth it.
Over the years I've learned it's ok to ignore if it seems like someone wants to pick a fight. Not everything has to be a debate, and no it doesn't make you look weak. You just got better shit to do than argue with strangers on the internet. :)
I've taken on the mantra of "Participate, but be respectful." That's led me to post a few times where I normally wouldn't.
Realize that there is nothing wrong with pissing someone off because they disagree with you. It's only wrong if you pissed them off because of how you said it, or if you are closed minded about being proven wrong.
And in the real world, a down vote doesn't matter.
I get this. I used to use Threads and someone got very angry at me cause I said Labour, supposedly the left wing party in the UK, are “upsetting the right people”, I should have clarified that I don’t think that they are doing a good job, but never mind.
It strongly depends where you go here - e.g. [email protected] was too extreme even for Reddit, so yeah the average here is WAY more chill, but we also have even more extremes here than they did there, if that makes sense.
The first step is to overcome the dependence of the common forum places, being able to renounce to them, remove your profile and learn to enjoy your life without them… only then you can happily drift into a less crowded and active community for ocasional wonders and quality instead of the saturation of engagement that “that” centralised social media offers, the peer pressure to be part of the main stream…
you're right, but these forums also crowdsource information which can be sorely needed, such as debugging help and problem resolution. unless we provide an alternate hub for this, we aren't likely to see the dominance of these common forums cease.
I see, my tip was thinking in meta/tiktok-like socials rather than reddit/stackoverflow-like. But I feel that it is not too much different. Probably the error was pouring so much knowledge in such “volatile” places (in the sense of user/community not really controlling it) in the first place, but aren’t human interactions already like that? Accept them as conversations lost in time, something always survive and returns, and new things always born. A pity, sure, but a part of life. In any case, it is quite unlikely to reach in a new place in barely a few years the same quantity of information than more than a decade of knowledge in old forums, yet I feel that pian piano people contributes to the shift… in the end we are humans which enjoy of social exchanges :D
I jumped on board with the reddit API fiasco. I use Sync primarily since I'm familiar with the format and I browse and post often.
I think one problem is that it's confusing to your average Joe. I honestly still don't quite understand how it works. I see posts like .ml and .world and I have no idea what they are even though I've been here a while.
I see posts like .ml and .world and I have no idea what they are even though I’ve been here a while.
In a group email, you might see people from Gmail and Outlook as recipients. It doesn't really matter that everyone, everyone can still see the emails and send them to each other.
If anyone can help, what's the "shit just works" pixelfed version? I joined the biggest one but don't want to give one instance too much power.
I tried to join the 5th or 6th largest but the buttons to sign up wouldn't work :(
Jokes aside, i completely agree. Meta and Xitter completely shot themselves in the foot (lol) and pixelfed is gaining mainstream attention, and the new year just started!
I predict we'll gain a massive influx of new users next year, due to the kindness of Zucc and Muskrat 😊
Many of which haven't been used in months. Years in some cases.
So - banned on one account linked to one address. Accounts linked to four other email addresses were banned. None of those accounts have been logged into from any device the account I got banned from was being used on.
The emails are linked to my phone number though.
So. Two steps ahead of you. But. They are either using some kind of NLP to identify the way I write. Or google is sharing that the accounts are linked to my phone number.
Anyway. Reddit can fuck right off. And I'll be buying a burner phone with cash to make some accounts soon.
Google is sharing the details. Reddit is lousy with Google trackers. You literally can't log in without Google and gstatic trackers being active. Only old.reddit.com doesn't send Google your views.
Because some of them, and their associated email accountsz hadn't been used in years.
And there is nothing linking any of the emails / accounts except my.phone number.
Five email accounts, 20 odd reddit accounts. I've only used one account / email for the past year. And that's from a PC / phone that were new around that time
Also, I want to mention Briar it's a peer-to-peer communications app that allows communications not only by internet (via tor), but also bluetooth, wifi. There are no servers, all the data on right on your device. Its available for Android, and there's also desktop clients. You can form a mesh network of your fellow revolutionaries, the oppressors can shut down the internet, but not the flow of information. If everyone in a protest added each other as contacts on Briar on their phone, you can theretically have a Briar forum that can share information on any law enforcemement or military movements, even during an internet shutdown. (beware of possible phone backdoors tho, maybe run Graphene OS or something)
There are already Briar Public Forums, but they don't have much activity (there's like 1 post/comment every other month, and that's it). But its like a secret corner of the internet. If we get more people to use it, we can potentially have a peer-to-peer network instead of only being decentralized, but still having servers.
briar comes with calyxos, and I've been considering it. The shame is I don't message all that much, and mostly use messagers for resources or distribution (can't believe so much support is moving to discord)
If you're privacy & security centered do NOT go with Calyx. They still use several g**gle services underneath it all. Graphene is the way to go, and no they are not affiliated with Copperhead (The one who proudly states they work with Raytheon) TLDR copperhead tried to take over Graphene but failed.
Also regarding rumors of it being a FBI honeypot, the feds advertised the backdoored phone /OS as being Graphene itself - or at the very least based on it in some way. It is not.
Just remember to use a oem unlocked android device. Carrier locked phones are often times luck-based in terms of getting it OEM unlocked. Often times they are literally impossible to get unlocked. Support CAN do it and HAVE THE TOOLS to unlock it for you but more often then not... they won't.
Don't get me wrong, Calyx without micro g (F-Droid + Obtainium) is a fantastic option plus it's compatible with a wide range of devices -just not as secure is all.
It's ironic, using a g**gle phone for privacy. Different strokes for different folks.
I'm a fediverse supporter (obviously, that's why I'm here), however what you're looking for requires a critical mass of users that the fediverse (at least the Lemmy side of it) will never achieve as long as two very critical problems persist:
sign up is confusing. People are used to clicking "create an account," inputting a user name, password, and maybe an email, and then BAM they're a user. I realize the whole instance thing is the entire point, but no one wants nor expects to have to do significant research and make a decision about how they want to interact with a social media site before they've even started using it.
the site (or at least lemmy.world) is sooo slooow. Basic functions like loading images take me back to the dial-up era of "click the image then do something else while it loads," which is downright ridiculous in the 2020s. Again I've stuck with it because I want to support the fediverse, but 99% of users won't.
And no, these aren't "features not bugs" unless you want to keep the site small and homogenous.
Blaze has put in a ton of work simplifying the former, and while the latter isn't strictly only related to Lemmy.world, many other servers are much faster.
e.g. click on https://discuss.online/, see how it shows All (rather than Local) by default (that's an issue with some), and Active. Click posts, see how fast images load, read the pinned posts and imagine how quickly the admin responds.
THEN if someone likes it, join. Many Redditors are in the USA, where discuss.online is also, so it's a great match.
There are other instances, but showcasing that one is a great way to help guide people to what Lemmy is all about.
possibly the biggest eye opener has been seeing how much the average person knows about computers, it's seriously hard to comprehend that divide (obligatory xkcd; https://xkcd.com/2501/), I think the best we can do is build a community, and give the loved ones in our lives an onboarding experience where we can. learning anything new is intimidating, but through exposure, it can be done, we've just gotta make it worth it.
I honestly don't understand point 1. no matter how much people say it.
Maybe I'm naive because it wasn't confusing to me personally, but it is only one extra step to create an account. When people explain the Fediverse to new people they compare it to e-mail anyway, which basically has the exact same sign-up structure. The only difference to me is the way it is advertised. Nobody in general says "you need to join e-mail", it's usually "join GMail" or "join Yahoo". I don't know how it would be solved without detracting from the "choose the instance that is right for you" experience though, since the instances with the most support and funding will obviously hold the most influence (as we currently see with lemmy.world and lemmy.ml, not to mention pixelfed.social).
IDK maybe I'm wrong, lmk, but I don't think choosing an instance is all the friction it's said to be.
I think you're drastically underestimating how even small steps like that can tune a ton of people out. If they're only sort of on the fence about it it might be enough to make it not worth it. Or maybe they'll think they'll check later but never get around to it.
Nobody in general says "you need to join e-mail", it's usually "join GMail" or "join Yahoo". I don't know how it would be solved without detracting from the "choose the instance that is right for you" experience though
No I think you're right, give them an instance. They won't have enough knowledge to choose an instance anyways. If they don't like the one you gave them then they can move later.
Me too. I don't get how people can't get past the choosing a server and I'm not a techie. Like have you ever played a video game and had to join a server? It's not that complicated! Lol. People are such lame giver uppers.
but no one wants nor expects to have to do significant research and make a decision about how they want to interact with a social media site before they've even started using it.
Then just directly recommend specific, general purpose instances to people.
Try another server. I use r.nf and it's very fast. Decentralisation is pointless if everyone flocks to the same server.
If people want freedom and independence, they're going to have to a little work for it, because those things never come for free. And yes, that is a feature, not a bug. That "I should not ever have to engage my grey matter" mentality is the whole cause of the corporate fascist mess in the first place.
I agree with you on 1. I hope it never fucking changes. The worst thing that could happen is we get the critical mass of dipshits that turns every online service into a fucking shit tornado.
I would agree to this but with one caveat
Let's try to be better than Reddit.
These days, Reddit and to some degree let me also has become a circle jerk of closed minds (on all sides of any issue). When confronted with a position they disagree with, people are far too quick to write the person off as a racist, statist, Nazi, anarchist, commie, etc. Rather than considering the merit of the person statement.
Let's be better than that.
Let's all be better than that.
Having a closed mind is easy. It's lazy. It gets you to that hit of dopamine faster, you tell someone off and hit post and you feel like you've done good. But most of the time you haven't. You've done nothing to persuade them of your viewpoint, or enhance the discussion for others.
That's not to say nobody's wrong. There's plenty of people who are wrong about every issue. But tell them why they're wrong. Have a little good faith, assume that just maybe the person on the other end of the thread has good intentions, also wants the world to succeed and society to be great, they just think their view will help make that happen better. So rather than calling them an idiot, tell them why you're right and your ideas are better. Engage with them.
That's how Reddit used to be. Not recently, I'm talking way back in the early days before the digg migration. It was a place for intelligent people to have reasoned discussions. Let's make lemmy more like that.
There's this thing called "Global Switch Day" that I'd like people to talk more about. It does not seem to be anything official, but I like to think that anything potentially bringing more people to the Fediverse deserves a bit of support. Also I've just done a small write-up on the things that might keep people from joining and/or staying with the Fediverse. I did the most 90s thing imaginable and posted it on my personal blog.
Yeah I’m guilty of that. I posted to Reddit today, but not Lemmy. I’ve been telling my friends to switch to federated social media, but I still find myself slipping back to Reddit. Not because I like Reddit better but because they have more content or I already know where to look for specific content. But I’m going to try and post more. Thanks for the reminder!
You'll notice some of these communities are a ghost town. Images are broken and there's a rat eating pizza. So step up. Avoid the large, overwhelmed, weirdly-political instances and give us little guys a chance.
I'll begin by introducing myself. Hi! I am oleorun, named after the recently deceased Bob Uecker's Baseball Hall of Fame speech. My instance, https://real.lemmy.fan/, is known for the [email protected] community, but we have more to offer. [email protected] , a college radio station, [email protected] , and more communities waiting to be joined, and built, and best of all there's no ads, no donation requests, just pure love of a federated instance that thrives on niceness.
I cannot express how much respect I hold for instance owners, you're doing something great! Maybe one day I'll follow in your footsteps (when I step up from small game servers :P). Say, would those dead communities qualify for a post in c/abandonedarchitecture?
Love that sentiment. And I love the fediverse. Thanks to every developer and every one of us using this. I deleted Reddit in 2022 and never looked back, thanks to all of you. I use my phone a little less, and YouTube is the only thing I still use that’s not federated.
Can you delete it a little harder? It's still there for me. Maybe you only put it in the thrash bin. You need to either empty the bin, or press shift+delete in order to delete it permanently.
Godspeed. We're all counting on you, oh ye who has the power to delete all of Reddit!
P.S.: Not trying to make fun of you, btw! Just entertaining myself. "Deleting" something sounds so different when you're used to using it through your browser. :D
Maybe in the coming 4 years people will finally understand why handing over everything to corps isn't great. Whether they'll do anything with that understanding is questionable though. The amount of "but it's so easy" and "I'm just one person" doomerism is fantastic.
It would be great to have a fediverse service for Meetup. Bending Spoons is aggressively enshittifying the original site, definitely ripe for disruption.
Would love a meetup replacement. It’s been hot garbage for a while. Not to mention a good portion of meetups in my city have died off since the pandemic :/
I know this is the wrong thing to focus on, but federated social media is really lacking sex appeal. Like the technology powering it is so cool, but many of the clients (especially the defaults) are ugly.
I’m not saying form over function, but I find well-designed + functional apps really enjoyable to use. I want to be the solution. I’m writing my own Lemmy client and I really hope I can deliver on the sex appeal in addition to an amazing user experience.
I joined Lemmy to find something like this. Have you seen Smoke Signal? It's an events site built on AT Protocol. Has promise but doesn't have the discussion threading that Meetup has.
I'm back after a year away. My two favourite niche interests (wrestling & fantasy books) still don't have hugely active communities but I'll start pitching in again with some lukewarm takes.
Yeah, I'm trying to change Reddit by Lemmy, and I'm moving out of Instagram, since I made it just to connect with friends (so I still have to ask some friends for contact info outside Reddit and Instagram so I can quit for good)
Since all this shit started happening I've deleted all the social media apps on my phone and I've started using lemmy more. Gonna switch my YouTube shit over to peertube when I can.
Intending to actually delete my accounts in the coming weeks too. Bye bye, 13 year old reddit account. Nobody gonna miss ya.
Tbf I have been using Nebula a lot since I signed up pretty cheaply and I enjoy it. It's owned by the creators. Found it through Jacob Geller.
YouTube is a bit of an issue as unlike the others there's a lot of content and information you can't get elsewhere.
I've been considering using a proxy to scrape and download subscriptions and add them to a personal server. Probably not practical to do for everything though with how much space that would be.
At the very least see if there's a wrapper that can strip out a lot of content and just show the stuff I want to watch VS all the nonsense they fire at you.
I mean if the account is deleted it's no longer tied (to the puboic at least), and I'm not about to fool myself into thinking my internet use is actually secure.
I think one that can be done is to create a pinned FAQ post in Reddit on the fediverse sub Reddit. I have seen so many questions popping up lately with a lot of potential users that seem confused.
I am SO thankful that there are so many people out there working on projects such as this! I gained lots of momentum in the past weeks protecting my privacy and taking digital matters back in my own hands, i wouldn't have come so far if it wheren't for all the other people who have been doing this for years! Thanks everyone :)
You said it! I remember years back looking for reddit alternatives and the only things around were stuff like raddle.me. Seeing lemmy and the fediverse develop like this? It's a dream come true!
Is there a list or links somewhere of the defederated basic site replacements?
Like I know about Lemmy (replacement for reddit), Loops (replacement for ticktock/reels), and pixelfed (replacement for insta). Oh and I switched from Spotify to tidal. 🤷🏼♀️
Is there a YouTube replacement? Thats really the next big media channel I use daily..
I like the idea of PeerTube and hope it catches on, but I wouldn't call it a YouTube replacement at this point. There are services that feed youtube content to users remotely though (there is/was a link-converter bot that went around that annoyed some people here, but a) can't remember the name, and b) can't remember the actual software involved).
The thing with Odysee is that I see A LOT of right-wing and religious nuts in my feed, even before login in, and in comment sections , and that alone basically drived me out
A lot of times I'll write out a comment and end up deleting it. Most times it's because I feel like it's something that's already been said or not worth reading but I'll try to be less of a lurker.
I'm in the exact same boat. But I kind of realized, if I want to see a bigger fediverse, I'll have to help build it up. As the classic saying goes, you can lead a horse to water; but first there's gotta be water. So thank you for taking up the cause of building this lake :)
I go through a cycle for this. I leave Reddit because I hate it. And then I go here and well it's quite obvious it's a certain type of people who are willing to jump through hoops and use the fediverse. I find most of the opinions here to be a little bit too extreme for my taste. I just want to discuss football (soccer) and tech...
But I agree with you. It only feels empty because we all decide to not hit "post".
Reddit was not much different in the beginning. It was kinda of weird and had a super Linux tech nerd culture with a circle jerky political culture. There was kind of a nice time between that and now, even though it was still niche. Hopefully we can see something like that again but without all the private interest ruining it in the end. But yeah, I’m with you.
All I want to ask of you is to just comment a few more times, press send on that post that you felt wasn’t of enough substance to be worth anyone’s time.
You don't even have to comment anything of substance, I just make shitty jokes all the time and say dumb shit. Just don't be a dick when you're doing it.
I'm afraid YouTube is a different beast entirely when it comes to replacing it, so I'm going to have to branch out on what 'alternative' means.
loops.video is a tiktok-esque shortform video service on the fediverse
owncast.online is a federated livestreaming platform, like twitch
funkwhale.audio is the fediverse's answer to music streaming.
I've also heard good things about radiofreefedi.net
and of course you've already heard of peertube.tv
but when it comes to YouTube, absolutely nothing holds a real candle to the variety anf quality of it's content, so you might want to look into alternatives such as Dropout.tv, Nebula, Odyssee (I have heard very bad things about Odyssee, but including for variety), or frontends like Invidious, Freetube, and Newpipe.
Hope this helps :)
PS: I have a post asking for peertube video reccomendations, which might have a comment or two with something of interest.
Reddit prob got big because they used bots to fudge their upvote numbers to make their site look more active than it is, I'm saying this with no evidence lol
There's Mastodon for your microblogging. There's Pixelfed for posting pictures kind of like Instagram. Loops for videos like TikTok. There's many others as well, but this should be a good start.
Despite my seniority around these parts (first started an interest in lemmy around 2022) I'm not too tied into the community around here. I'd reccomend just subscribing to some interesting large communities, communities around your interests and whatever community would be best for whatever pops into your mind! If you'd like, feel free to message me and we can throw around ideas of what could be right for you!
Just wanted to pop in and say, I am so glad so many of you are taking this to heart! I am sitting here with a genuine smile on my face, which for reference NEVER happens. Thank you everyone!
You aren't entirely wrong, but I feel it could help build an appearance of high activity, which would help attract people. Also; many people wish to contribute but stifle the words before they can come out of their mouth, and I'm hoping a post like this could be the push they needed.
It's a fair call, I think I'll push send more often from now on!
Honestly half the reason I don't post these days is more not wanting to feed LLMs/dox myself further, but that's a whole other can of worms to worry about
Also, I find a nice way to fill my feed is to liberally subscribe to communities on Lemmy. I'm currently subscribed to 133. I set my feed to Subscribed+Scaled and that works incredibly well to show me what I care about. Then when I get bored, I flip to All+TopDay to get what I missed that day.
I’ve started explaining this to non-techies. Hopefully starting to gain a little traction as the meta/ticktock machine becomes more and more egregious. Also this is speeding up the homelab I’m building.
Not using other social media annymore. Lemmy was my first introduction to the fediverse. Now I am also using Mastodon and experiment with a hubzilla hub on my homeserver.
I did start a community for 3d (3dee), dropshipping (dropshipping lol), and chairs (deskchairs) since those were some communities I used on reddit that I didn't see here. Made a general one for 3d since its still small here and spreading the programs out means less visibility and posts on each community imo. Haven't posted yet and neither has anyone else tho.
Yeah I just also use houdini, embergen, etc. and there is no community for those. Others could be using cinema4d, 3ds max, etc. but the result is all 3d, so I thought there should be one encapsulating them all, showing when the popular programs get major updates or if a new one pops up.
What iphone apps do yall use? Rnow I'm using loops for the tiktokclond (hoping more creators join and post there) and mlem for lemmy (liking it more than voyager, arctic seems cleaner but I got used to this interface). Does anyone have a good mastadon app they reccomend? I'm using bluesky since getting an okay feed was easier there, not sure if thats the apps fault. I do like an algorithim just not one based on controversy.
I'm one of the Mlem developers; I'm glad you're enjoying it :) You could also consider trying the Mlem beta if you haven't already. It's about 8 months' worth of development ahead of the App Store version. The reason why we haven't updated the App Store version in so long is because the beta version doesn't have all of the moderation tools yet (due to it being a full rewrite), and we don't want to take those tools away from moderators who use Mlem.
So far went with voyager. Haven’t reviewed the others. Mlem/arctic any better? Need to died something for loops and pixelfied for the other people I know
Mlem is like voyager but better imo, arctic looks really good atlo, they are all mostly similar, I like arctics feed but im used to mlem, arctic can show photos and vids in formats that sometimes dont work in voyager or mlem rnow
What is peoples opinions on reposting. Sometimes i see a cool video from a creator i like and i want to repost it to loops but i feel like im stealing and reuploading their work. I think reposting to lemmy is fine since its a link aggregation site first.
But can we still be scenical? Since social media doesn't fulfill a need perse, I was thinking maybe my scenical comments with misspelled words at wrongly advised times would help. It helps me relieve work related stress. Is that how you spell scenical? Scenical, when you cause a scene. No I mean Cynical! Yeah that one!