Get out, now.
this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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After being on fediverse it’s been great how refreshing and natural real decentralized social media is rather than the astroturfed, money and soul sucking dreck that is the big corporate socials are.
I almost wish there was a way that we could encourage growth and somehow let it scale to critical mass through grants and donations. But eventually if the fediverse got to that size then there would be grifters and corporations to ruin our fun.
Right! The fediverse is 100% a happier place. I love Lemmy and Firefish and Pixelfed. I'm deleting Facebook as soon as I collect enough email addresses.
This is the first I've heard of Firefish. What's the advantage of using that instead of Mastodon?
Much more customizable and in my opinion far easier to navigate, and for some reason way cuter. You can also download the app right from Firefish when you sign up, there's no dealing with the app store. I don't quite know but it's super friendly, all sorts of strangers greeted me and followed me when I joined, which definitely didn't happen with Mastodon. I just find it strangely adorable and full of cool people and very positive, and for some reason I don't find Mastodon that way.
Yeah, I mean, Lemmy and other fediverse instances need to play their cards carefully. If they are to be the future, then they need to not cave into what has plagued the other social media platforms we've long used before them.
Thats not how any of this works though. Corpos and governments are free to spin up their own instances of any federated service right now. It is the future, but the future is small bubbles that communicate with each other. So we don't have to be on Meta's instance, or Wal-Mart's, or even the US's national instance. We can stay where we are and keep it like this.
Some people really can't grok this. I remember trying to explain Diaspora to a friend several years ago, and he said "Yeah, but if Diaspora got as big as Facebook, then they would turn evil, too!"
I had to patiently re-explain how instances work, but I still don't think he got it. We've been living with big corporations running the Web for so long that some people can't even imagine it being any different, and that's scary.
lt was so easy for me, personally. I have to reassert my own biases everytime I talk to someone about federation because it just makes sense to me. Its equivalent to a bunch of email servers talking to each other. I can send an email to whoever I want, as long as my provider has not blocked them or I myself have not. Picking an instance is like picking gmail/outlook/yahoo.
How well does that explanation work? When a bunch of people were migrating to Mastodon last year, I remember some were still very confused, even after the comparison to email.
With enough time and enough pressure, I think that the vast majority of people would figure it out, though. They figured out email, and if you tried to explain that to anybody in 1990, they would've looked at you like you had an extra head.
Tbh its hit or miss, and I'm all out after that. I'm too deep in the tech sauce to return my brain to 0 and explain it from the outside. So when people don't get it after that I often just leave them to their walled gardens.