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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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
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.
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.
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.
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".
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..
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.
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.
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!
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.
It would be great to have a fediverse service for Meetup. Bending Spoons is aggressively enshittifying the original site, definitely ripe for disruption.
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.
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!
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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 :(
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!