A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
set up a monthly contribution even if it’s just $2/month
~~I remember somewhere on the fedi, some instance admin saying that on average it cost $2/month per user. So, if you are relatively active on the server, $2 monthly recurring donation might cover your share of expenses.~~ maybe not a very good idea
how I can make a difference
https://blog.elenarossini.com/supporting-the-fediverse-one-small-act-at-a-time/
2$ a month is bad advise as payment processing fees will eat too much of it. Costs are also usually much less than 2$/month/member, but that is assuming the admin labor is provided by volunteers.
Yep. I think that we're on the precipice of what's to come.
It gives me memes and that’s close enough
Yes
Absolutely.
That’s a cool idea? How do we actually make that happen? Call up NPR?
We don't have control of our world, we never did. Just distance yourself from the madness and embrace the good in the world. Focus on those things and it becomes your reality.
Why can’t I do a bit of both? Maybe start by voting with my money by supporting less unethical businesses.
Voting doesn't work, they control the candidates. Money and power is what people like that want, and they get that in exchange for playing along.
Hopeful that some parts of the population won't be giving all their data away. There will always be bootlickers (apple fanboys, google lovers, reddit aficionados, Musk-worshippers, ...) , people who just don't know better (too old, uninterested, ignorant, unexposed, ...), and people who can't join due to things like censorship, internet speed, or whatever else.
Unfortunately, I am an Apple user lol. I don’t hate the products, but don’t care for Tim Cook, and I hate their labor practices. I also hate that they are anti-right-to-repair. I do appreciate the quality of their products and software. I hope the government slaps them with the biggest antitrust lawsuit.
Moving forward, I will be considering alternatives due to the ethics of their manufacturing. I am a big open-source supporter, and I understand that my support of Apple is a bit of cognitive dissonance. But I do wish Linux could find a way to deliver a product that feels as refined as a MacBook. I would be willing to donate to an effort to do so.
But I do wish Linux could find a way to deliver a product that feels as refined as a MacBook. I would be willing to donate to an effort to do so.
There are quite a few efforts to make linux a default and provide a good UX. One way to support them is buying stuff with linux pre-loaded. Then it's using stuff like KDE, Gnome, other desktop enviroments and donating to them. I exclusively buy from linux hardware vendors (as in desktops and laptops) and have been donating non-stop to a few opensource projects for about 5 years now (maybe even longer).
The Linux Foundation though... I think only an external force could convince them to spend more than 2% of their budget on linux itself...
I don't think the fediverse as it currently exists will draw a significant amount of people away from the larger social media communities, but who knows? My partner isn't particularly tech-savvy and she was on Mastodon without me ever having mentioned it to her. She was also the first person between us to use PixelFed.
I feel like the fediverse in its current incarnation is much like the early internet. It has a lot of promise, but most people on it are those who are enthusiasts and/or idealists. If the fediverse becomes easier to engage with over time, I can see it growing in appeal. If the fediverse equivalent of a killer app or high-profile voice gets established, we could see some huge growth.
I think that one of the hurdles it will face is that hosting these instances isn't free. With the centralized apps, they have VC funding they can burn through while they try to figure out how to monetize their service and to build it to be robust enough to be stable while handling growth.
What happens when a large instance has to pull the plug due to lack of funding, or they fail because they get hacked and/or don't have working backups, or the person/people who run it turn out to have an agenda? How things move on from those disruptions will be very telling for the future of the fediverse. They're all things that could happen, and I'm sure at least one of them will happen at some point.
Not particularly. History is long. And history tells us people don't have any self-respect. Even when doing something as simple as NOT doing something, like using an abusive platform.
Numbers are going up, yet I don't know a single person who has made the switch. I made an appeal on Facebook and several dozen people liked and commented and agreed and expressed interest, but not one of them switched.
I have, however, seen dozens of people firing up accounts on the VC-backed centralized platform that is BlueSky, and hundreds of millions of people switching to Meta-owned Threads, proving that they've learned absolutely nothing.
I get what you’re saying, but that train of thought isn’t very productive IMO. First, I agree with you on BlueSky, and I even tell that to all my friends switching to BlueSky, but I also believe it’s better than Twitter.
I think we should stop and ask ourselves why people are choosing BlueSky over Mastodon. How do we learn lessons from this switch to BlueSky and use what we learn to draw more people into the Fediverse?
I know I’m probably being idealistic, but I also think being pessimistic won’t increase our chances of winning in the end.
I have never visited either Mastodon or Bluesky before this week, but I finally did a test yesterday. I wanted to see how easy it was to find mention of that Reddit group fedinews that "everyone" seems to be talking about lately. Note, I'm not trying to promote Reddit here, it's a legitimate trend and I wanted to see if there were meta-discussions about such.
First, on Lemmy there are zero mentions of this term that I could find with a search from the past six months.
Second, Mastodon.social had like 1-2 items tops.
Third, Bluesky had the topic plastered all over the front page, without me needing an account, making it darn near impossible for someone to miss even if they tried.
TLDR: the content is either on Reddit or Bluesky, unless we are talking about using Arch btw, or promoting violent overthrow of the entire Western philosophy and way of life (having a bank account = being a landlord btw). Yes there are tiny niches on Lemmy, and I love them, but if our goal was somehow to replace Reddit or X for a source of discussions as to what is going on in the world... then we would have failed.
Bluesky seems to offer people what they want. I suggest that Mastodon copy that, if it is capable of doing so.
Edit: also, getting back to the original point, read this essay on features in PieFed, a Lemmy alternative, that will help offer democratization of moderation, putting the power back into the hands of The People to choose what they want to see or not rather than relying solely on a mod to make those choices for someone. e.g. there are icons that can go next to a username ("account is <2 weeks old", "posts >50x more often than comment, could be an unregistered bot?", "uaer offers controversial content, receiving >20x more downvotes than upvotes", etc.), and people can choose to auto collapse comments with lots of downvotes (easily opened with but a single click though!) or even automatically hidden entirely. Different users can share the same community and each get the experience that they want out of it. PieFed is still not fully developed, but all of these features that I've described here already exist, along with many other highly-requested ones like Categories of Communities, hashtags, YouTube embedding, the ability to block all users from an instance of the users choice without requiring admin approval, and more. I have lost most hope for "Lemmy", but PieFed gives me the hope again that I once placed into Kbin, only reluctantly transferring that to Lemmy.
Yes but then I realized that unfortunately it will never take off and suffers from most of the issues that centralized sites suffer from. So yea, rip.
Its nice as a place to talk to mostly like-minded people and avoid the increasingly common AI bot slop, but it is too spread out internationally to be a useful communication tool for organizing local activities, which is a bit sad.
It could grow into something that could be used to organize locally! But for now, I think the goal should be information and comments shared on our terms, not on big social media’s terms.
Nothing gives me hope.
At least there is some small respite.
No, the Fediverse is full of conservatives. The technology is great, but the people here suck.