My experience is that nobody cares about privacy, moral issues or anything that might be an issue in the future. They only care about convenience, distraction and whatever their peer group is doing. So the "attention" this is getting is never going to reach the spineless mass audience.
this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2025
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Sup
Signal is better as a centralized alternative and Matrix is better as a decentralized alternative. We don't need another messenger.
I've been on ethical alternatives for social media for a while and the one thing missing is just everyone I know
I've been getting into the fediverse for less than a month, and it seems the biggest barrier for a newcomer like me is settling on a select few out of many clients/apps. One question I think a lot of people migrating want to know is (and I open this up to anyone):
What's the fewest signups needed if we want to enjoy all of the federated replacements to corporate social media? It sounds like each client demands its own account but I'm wondering where/if there's overlap, because…
My Lemmy account already worked on movim before i discovered movim. That's really cool but I don't know 100% how that worked (same community server, I think), and how many other apps/clients offer that.
Movim is XMPP and I don't know how that overlaps with ActivityPub, but I want to better understand so that I know how few accounts are necessary so I can micro and macro blog, share original/repost images videos and music, have group communities, and have a personal page to post things on as opposed to thread/conversations/forum posts and not have to manage ten separate accounts if I can help it
So get them on there.
"Hey dummies, this here is the place that isn't trying to fuck us, let's move it over."
For me the way bigger issue is clunkiness. The fediverse needs a massive push for UI, usability, intuitiveness. Not having that will turn people away, but part of what will get it to happen is more people showing up and saying "stop making this otherwise objective improvement so janky that I second guess coming here in the first place." Maybe a few will be inspired to help, if they have the skills.
To everybody working on the fediverse in any capacity: thank you. You are building a digital Noah's Ark for the future.
Takes time. Spread the message. I joined Instagram in 2017 by pure FOMO. Let's create FOMO for the Fediverse by speaking about it over and over.
Heads up @dansup@lemmy.world the creator of these apps refuses to open source the projects stating (Loops):
Not until it's stable
Anyone who's followed any project of any kind knows that this is just a formal way of saying they just won't do it.
Not only is it not truly OSS, but he's a bit of dick. Like weirdly so. Banning people for reverse engineering the API, creating a poll on whether or not ads should be introduced (only to 180 on the matter claiming the poll was a joke but also emphasizing that the poll was in favor of ads)
On the plus side he dislikes Trump, so there's that I guess.
In any case I highly recommend people read this comment and the sources linked:
I think the weirdest thing I ever saw him do was discuss meeting with Meta when they were working on Threads, get called out for it so he made a post somehow distancing himself from it and saying something along the lines of, "C'mon, guys; I'd never cozy up to Meta," and then, when Threads started federating, posted a screenshot of being able to see a post from a Threads account from PixelFed and gushing about how incredible this was.
Dude is suspect, for real; glad to see I'm not the only one getting that.
EDIT: just read through what you linked to and wow; that's so much worse than I originally thought. That's an inane degree of unprofessionalism.
And the ads... There is a correlation there I'm sure.
Yvan eht noij!
Big ups to @dansup@lemmy.world for his contributions and congrats to him being mentioned in the article.
No mention of Lemmy. Hardly a mention of Mastodon. The leading image is all the oligarch apps. I'm not impressed.
Hitching on the wagon that Pixelfed is leading is good. There's a lot of talk even from those who don't care about FOSS, or Fediverse projects. Let's give some credit and let things slide so the whole can succeed.
This right here.
Look at the objective. The objective is to kill corporate sponsered social media. Well what better way to do that then by normalizing non corporate social media in the minds of the masses?
Yeah, I don't mind Pixelfed getting attention at all. It's just that I don't trust Forbes, and this article seems to want to muddy the waters.
It's Forbes - if they don't use an image in the thumbnail of a thing people know, they might as well not use anything. It's normie-facing.
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"Mastadon"
The normies are trying :)
While Masturdon was ripe for the picking
Not too be confused with the Masturbatron.
Someone should create a mastodon instance called "Masta Dom"
Something something about race play domination kink
MastaDon is the new TruthSocial app.
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One thing we need to mention is funding.
While BlueSky may benefit from venture capital, free (as in beer) open source projects where user data is not commercially exploited for revenue do not have the same benefit. They rely a LOT on donations for running the infrastructure and for the hours and hard work that people are putting in.
Good point. Theoretically surmountable because Wikipedia.
But donors are going to have to be convinced that social media is a social good.
I know ads are very hated here, but I wouldn't be against an ad at a reasonable cadence to increase sustainability. Then create a pro version that gets rid of ads that's like $2-5 a month or $30 a year. The real problem is the exploitation of this system like Reddit/Insta feeding an ad every other post. Or Twitter charging nearly $13 a month for a check mark.
The sync app got so much hate for having ads during the original migration, but a lot of us here are devs and we should definitely get paid for our effort and be able to maintain our infrastructure without our of pocket money.
Agreed.
However these ads need to be curated as well. This is the other thing that makes ads unbearable, is that a lot of them are just blatant scams.
I have learnt about proton and tuxedo from ads as well, which i use both.
I agree to an extent, I'm tired of reddit spamming me with ads for Database management systems while I'm on vacation 🤣
Yeah, ads also wouldn’t be an issue if the user was given control about how their data is used to decide on what ads to show them. Users could have an option to opt in to more targeted ads but be able to choose what aspects of their data are taken into account, if at all. Maybe all data sharing is turned off by default, but a user could opt in to ads that interest them like interior decoration, or furniture, or workout equipment, etc… while still being able to ban ads they don’t want to see, like political ads.
Yeah I think this is a very important point.
I think people will need to learn to accept that there is no such thing as "free". The current social media sells you to advertisers, taking every bit of data they can get.
So for independent and privacy focused social media, we're going to have to accept we have to pay for it.
I've moved to paying for my email, my file storage, my VPN and my password manager - all for privacy and security. I pay for subscriptions for streaming to avoid advertising. So I would pay for social media.
In the early days of the internet, people accepted paying for things but then the "free" model came along. The fediverse will need to persuade people to pay for it. That may limit it from being the big everyone social medial, but it could be able to become the high quality version of social media that people pay for.
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WhatsApp ❌
Signal ✅
I wish I could get everyone to use it but many of my friends are having trouble with notifications not working reliably for Signal. Or sometimes messages are simply not sent immediately, even if both sides are online. This is not helping to get people over. Also no one but me really cares about all the reasons why I would like to get rid of Whatsapp, especially if they would have a lesser experience.
I was pissed at Signal for dropping SMS support. Their rationalisation was kinda bs. Now I just use matrix instead, since it's decentralised.
In practice Matrix isn’t decentralized in the slightest. Almost every account is on Matrix.org or a server they host. The whole protocol is a data/metadata syncing machine that isn’t good for privacy & is prohibitively expensive to run anything beyond a single-instance since all history of all users in all rooms necessarily needs to be synced onto the server. Many medium-sized servers have shutdown on storage costs & system resource requirements (especially RAM)—which forced its users often to flock back to Matrix.org. This is wild since it is mostly text chat.
Luckily there are actually decentralized chat alternatives with low system requirements to encourage self-hosting, but man is Matrix so overhyped & misunderstood.
Luckily there are actually decentralized chat alternatives with low system requirements to encourage self-hosting, but man is Matrix so overhyped & misunderstood.
Thank you for the illuminating post. Could you name a few alternatives that better align with the ethos of the fediverse?
XMPP for reliable, lightweight, & stable. SimpleX is a project worth keeping tabs on as well.
They literally were not given any out (and were unwilling to take the one they had, or forgot they had it). People were complaining that SMS isn't secure even in Signal (when SMS by design can't be), which buils undue mistrust on the project, and Google is the one who controls all the keys to RCS so implementing that was not an option either.
The part where Signal dropped the ball hard is that they could just as well perfectly revived their old, perfectly functional SMS app with a new name and add it to the project,and thus be able to claim they still support SMS. Since SMS is pretty much a build-and-done for thing, it would barely if ever need any maintenance or updates.
Their rationale was that SMS is not secure and having something not secure on their app was damaging.
In what way is it insecure? If the user was going to message someone off platform they'd still be sending them an unencrypted message anyways if they have to switch apps to SMS. If users didn't understand the distinction, that's a design failure on signal's part.
To a lot of us, SMS fallback was the killer feature signal provided.
At least with matrix, it's decentralised. If they ever try to rug pull like signal did, their users can at least choose to not update if they self-host their own instance. I'd imagine a lot of lemmings would appreciate that, considering.
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Impressive that a site like Forbes is writing about the Fediverse. A small step to helping it into the mainstream.
Crypto chat! Crypto pics! Crypto vids! Nostr! Crypto!
I hope you're mean Crypto as in Cryptography
I hope that's going to succeed. And those are the platforms in demand. While Mastodon is losing users, and we've been stagnating for quite some time already... Pixelfed is currently going off the charts. We'll have to see where this leads to and if it's going to last.
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