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.
Thank you :)
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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.
It would be great to have a fediverse service for Meetup. Bending Spoons is aggressively enshittifying the original site, definitely ripe for disruption.
i have never used meetup, does mobilizon seem a decent fit? https://joinmobilizon.org/en/
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.
nice cake
[email protected] (blocked by lemmy.world instance)
Sail free in the high seas!
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.
thank you for this post, did not know about the public forums list 😉
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.
to be fair, I set up calyx a while ago, back when i was only at the beginning of my privacy journey, and still thought i might need google services. Though I’ll absolutely be giving graphene a try when I can!
any youtube alternatives in the fediverse? I know about peertube.
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.
You’re gonna regret asking me to post more but… your wish is my command! 🪄
thank you!
I was recently banned from reddit.
On all my accounts.
Across four email addresses.
Simultaneously.
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 put this into my hosts file a couple years back:
127.0.0.1 *reddit*
fuck reddit.
Fuck Reddit man. Fuck Reddit into the ground. Lemmy is getting there, feels like early Reddit. Comments are still removed from lemmy though
alone we are strong … together lemmy may grow stronger
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.
How do you know your accounts weren’t part of a ban wave? It doesn’t necessarily mean they linked them through your phone.
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.
God damn! I’m trying my hardest here!
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 make only good jokes 💀
Ok, dumbass.
try harder! fool!
I just deleted most of my other social media apps and am trying to lean into the fediverse and nostr as much as I can.
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:
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The big instances are definitely slower though.
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.
I was confused by #1 before I got a grasp of Lemmy then I realized lemmy.world is the largest instance and I can just sign up here.
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.
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I already use fediverse an unhealthy amount, if I do more I might die.
Then die.
you aren’t social mediaing right unless it makes you bleed
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.
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’s sad when people’s call to action is when things go into freefall I cant claim superiority though, I’ve been there
I don’t think advertising here is necessary 😉
They posted the same on reddit. It’s an open letter to humans.
It’s not saying “everyone come to lemmy” it’s saying “everyone post more an reinvigorate communities”.
Unexpected [email protected]
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’ve heard good things about Nebula, and I’m hoping to get an account when I’ve saved enough
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’m considering making some Peertube content to help water the drought! Just need some good ideas, haha
Bye bye, 13 year old reddit account.
don’t forget to delete your comments there!
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.
During the API exodus a lot of us deleted our comments bc we didn’t like the fact that Reddit was monetizing the knowledge we had created. Some people argued that it was better that the knowledge remain out there. Either way is cool I guess.
That’s understandable! I’ll consider this when I go to delete my account. Thank you for that info!
