Fediverse

I like the concept of the fediverse, just like I liked Fidonet back in the 80’s (that allowed BBSs to “exchange” both forum contents, called “echomail”, and private messages).

I have some issues on sustainability (hosting costs money, moderation and system maintenance can be a pain) and the “donation” model. My solution is that while I host for myself, and don’t really mind having some guest on my platform, I don’t take / accept donations - ever. My instance dies the moment I don’t have the resources to maintain it (money, time or patience). The main reason I don’t take donations is really simple: I don’t want to owe anyone anything, this is not a job or a burden I have to carry.

I have been hosting systems for 35+ years, and it’s all good with no money involved. It’s a blast dealing with the tech, really love it. Most of my systems and either one or two users (me and the wife). :-)

no because they're always broken as fuck for me here in Vietnam since you all put the fucking api behind a xenophobic cloudflare proxy

Yeah, it does give me hope. I've always been a lurker on Reddit, and it made me uneasy.

Here on feddit, i still find it difficult to express my thoughts in a direct and straightforward way, but at least i can try, and i feel like we're actually making progress, because people are listening and sometimes give well-thought-out responses. that makes me happy. We can both learn a lot.

Apart from that:

Friendly reminder if you have the financial means, donate to your instance, donate to the Lemmy devs, donate to Pixelfed or any other social media app fighting big social media. And better than a one-time donation, set up a monthly contribution even if it’s just $2/month. It really helps open-source developers when they have a steady income.

Yeah, please do. I've calculated that hosting lemmy costs approximately $2/year/user, but the numbers vary a bit depending on how many files you upload. So, that's not a lot, but for a few thousand users, it would still amount to something. So, please, donate if you can, even if it's only $5/year.

The fedi could destroy the whole Gafam ecosystem overnight if people would just move to it. But most people are selfish idiots.

i like it here and have no desire to switch over to big tech or any algorithm.

Hope in what sense? Hope that it's generally possible to connect online without corporate social media? Sure ...

Hope that it'll become a replacement social media at a large scale? Probably not ... I think the way push-federation is implemented makes it inconvenient and hard to grasp, and generally people seem to prefer centralized platforms for the sheer convenience of use, which is hard to beat.

So I guess it'll remain stable in it's own little niche ... which isn't bad I suppose ...

I'm not in the US (thinking of you guys everyday), but when I found myself feeling depressed by the direction of big tech, I realized that open-source and the Fediverse was the healthy and exciting way forwards. It was the one thing that felt like I remember the internet feeling like in the late 90s. I think you are spot on. It is the only way that democracy can survive in tech.

No.

Yes. But I'm worried about Big Tech hijacking ActuvityPub and that they enforce the end of net neutrality. EU regulations and investments is our only hope right now.

Frankly, it’s stressing me out. The non-stop barrage of Trump, Musk and other bullshit is just a bit too much on here. I get how the platform generally is very left leaning, but it really does feel like the sky is falling every five minutes, you know?

Lemmy, the Fediverse, and open source in general too. Every time bullshit happens I find myself more and more replacing closed systems with community-developed and community-run systems. It’s not only the giving back/contributing/being part, and the openness, it’s also that this cannot be taken away so easily. Taken by buying the company, a software update, agreement change or the fact that someday you may not be able to pay your monthly fee and loose access to all your stuff.

Honestly, it's just a matter of time before they make more Luigis snap. Hopefully they'll be an organized way to oust them all before the guillotines and the dining sets start coming out.

It's nice, but it doesn't really give me hope. Lemmy is good because it's not mainstream. Once it got relevant, it would turn into today's reddit. And if it, by chance, evolved into relevant opposition, I believe it would be easy for billionaires to destroy, despite the decenzralized character. It could also be used for curbing the opposition by gathering information about it. There's no way to hide from people with enough money.

Hope ? Maybe, maybe not

No, it's continued relative unpopularity in the face of universal hated-but-contined-use of the mainstream networks continues to be depressing.

Although the onboarding process for most of the major fediverse platforms is a bit scary for normies.

It does give me hope, but I also worry it may be a double edged sword and opening pandora’s box. There are way too many ideologies here that aren’t democracy. Given how easy the public was brain washed by Trump, I fear this may be an avenue to expose those people to things that probably shouldn’t even be crossing their minds.

It gives me confidence. I know that now that I host my own lemmy, I cannot be randomly banned because I triggered some automatic spam filter with my scripts (happened in reddit), or banned because I talked back to the wrong mod. I know that our internationally distributed nature makes it harder to control top-down, so takeovers like Musk-Xitter are not possible. We can still be affected by disinfo campaigns and troll farms, and we unfortunately have weakened defenses against that, but I'm confident that a lot of smart admins and tooling providers will bunch together to figure out the countermeasures that will work.

the Fediverse really seems like it could be our response to these fuckers controlling the narrative on social media. It could be more than just an interesting decentralized social media platform. I really think this could be a key step in reclaiming our democracy.

Agreed, and I would add that finding ways to get nonprofit news organizations (e.g. ProPublica) and public media (e.g. NPR, PBS, etc.) to host and administer their own instances and to start directing their readers/listeners to those services would be a great way to advance this goal

It gives me hope yeah, alot of my family and coworkers are extremely conservative and it's given me hope that they're not the default for cis people. I've since gotten away from alot of them and met irl friends who're more accepting but the presence of people online who didn't begrudgingly tolerate me before then has given me hope and the courage I would need to advocate for myself and not accept the bare minimum

Using the Fediverse feels like a small step in the right direction. Big changes are built on lots of small steps. I would say move in the direction of using the Fediverse more, the old alternatives less, and think of more small steps in the right direction you can do. I don't think just using the Fediverse is enough, but it is an important step to take. Keep going.