John Oliver promoted alternatives to big tech in last night's episode, including Mastodon and Pixelfed
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Don't get me wrong, I agree with everything you've said here.
SMS and MMS are an antique technology, I can't argue that. But it's not going to change the fact that my family is not going to install another messaging app on their device in order to talk to me. They're going to text me or call me anyway so therefore there's no point, and hopefully with the improvements on the RCS standard the issues that have occurred with SMS and MMS will go away.
As is I have four different messaging apps on my phone ignoring my messages app, signal (which I can count on one hand the amount of my friends that have an account), Discord which the majority of my online friends are on, and less than a handful of my relatives are on. Telegram which I mostly have for artists, and Revolt which I really should uninstall but like I really want that project to go somewhere.
My family is almost exclusively on Facebook messenger, I do not use Facebook Messenger, sms/rcs is the only system that my relatives and I both have, and they're not about to dump Facebook Messenger which works completely for what they want solely to talk to one person which would be me.
So yes I fully agree with everything you've stated there, 100%. But it's a perfect example of how on paper it sounds amazing but in practice it doesn't work. At the end of the day my family is going to text me regardless if I tell them that I'm on Signal, because I'm not on Facebook and they already have SMS on their phone
Oh in practice it works quite well for me, basically all my friends and family use Signal now. You can slightly push them towards that, explain the obvious pros, it's simple to install, so it's just a small matter of convincing. I only rarely use WhatsApp for some external groups.
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Holy shit! A sane rational Lemmy user in the /c/Fediverse community! Someone who sees the bigger picture, and isn't just reacting to this small niche area of the internet.
Look, I love Lemmy, but I can't sit by and act like just because something is a better service, and makes logical sense to use, that people will ever have even heard of it. That's not how PEOPLE work. Yes, Lemmy is better than reddit. But no, Lemmy will not overtake reddit in usercount maybe in my lifetime. Unless reddit gets sold, and then plummets into death like myspace did. Then Lemmy wins by default, but it's not the same thing.
And
everyone(well, everyone but you I guess) most people on this community seems to miss all that.I think the uphill battle here is that a good amount of the active users on lemmy are probably very tech savvy. The percentage of us who arenβt, are doing it wrong in their eyes.
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The thing that it really has going for itself is that it simply isn't twitter. And Muskler made sure that's a huge deal.
Using it myself, this is technically true but also it's literally Twitter pre-takeover-- like a fork all the tolerable people started using. You've got your George Takei and your Stephen King, etc, so it's what left of center normies can enjoy without being a little too far (like us, here).
If I'm being honest, I prefer to mix the two communities because a little too much Fediverse can make you go crazy, plus I spread Lemmy ideology there cause someone's gotta bring up class warfare and Linux, right?
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Using it myself, this is technically true but also it's literally Twitter pre-takeover-- like a fork all the tolerable people started using. You've got your George Takei and your Stephen King, etc, so it's what left of center normies can enjoy without being a little too far (like us, here).
If I'm being honest, I prefer to mix the two communities because a little too much Fediverse can make you go crazy, plus I spread Lemmy ideology there cause someone's gotta bring up class warfare and Linux, right?
Oh I agree. I'm just not there because twitter was never my thing. Keep up the fediverse propaganda, comrade.
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Wait how is Squid this popular?
I'd say it is more notoriety than popularity.
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Come to Lemmy, we got: blood thirsty Linux users, furries, femboys, communists, and tankies. Also, porn.
And knives.
And beans.
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How much do you need!?????!
What exactly does a DragonTypeWyvern tail look like?
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Yeah, you can get away with really cheap operations up until you start blowing through your cdn and communication budget
I'm not too worried about it.
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If you've been sitting on making a post about your favorite instance, this could be a good opportunity to do so.
Going by our registration applications, a lot of people are learning about the fediverse for the first time and they're excited about the idea. I've really enjoyed reading through them
I say give it three years and blue sky will just be a neolib twitter
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The Internet was never supposed to have a central authority beyond the DNS tables.
Imagine traveling down a liminal space of tubes and the only signs are nondescript TLDs.
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Be the change you want to see
Ain't nobody wanna see that.
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Oh in practice it works quite well for me, basically all my friends and family use Signal now. You can slightly push them towards that, explain the obvious pros, it's simple to install, so it's just a small matter of convincing. I only rarely use WhatsApp for some external groups.
Whatsapp isn't really a thing in my area but man is Facebook messenger is, but yeah nice that you were able, I didn't have much luck with my relatives to switch over to signal or Discord back when it took off, they just sort of stayed on Facebook.
My online friend group had a higher adoption rate for discord from skype at first but, that might just be because I refused to give them my phone number so they couldn't access me elsewhere.
Really the only group that I had really have an interest in other alternatives, was my cybersecurity class in college, but even they tended to straight towards Discord more than signal (which is insane to me)
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Ain't nobody wanna see that.
Only you
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Have you heard of bridgy?
IMO bridgy is not well designed. The fact that it requires both the follower and the followee to specifically opt in basically makes it DOA. Both Mastodon and BlueSky are completely open and public in terms of post visibility, so bridgy should have been designed to require explicit opt outs from anyone who didn't want their content bridged.
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If you've been sitting on making a post about your favorite instance, this could be a good opportunity to do so.
Going by our registration applications, a lot of people are learning about the fediverse for the first time and they're excited about the idea. I've really enjoyed reading through them
I feel like the DNC are being pushed into a blindspot for the general public.
All Bernie has done is go around to speak at different events, and he is far from the only politician to do so.
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Come to Lemmy, we got: blood thirsty Linux users, furries, femboys, communists, and tankies. Also, porn.
Well, reddit has nothing at this point, so it's better than the competition.
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Do you really think Lemmy could handle the amount of people that Reddit has?
As far as I know the existing instances are usually running on capacity and always in need of donations, and thatβs when the owner isnβt handling the costs themselves. Iβm not sure how well most instances have right now.
Maybe Lemmy would benefit of some way to get people to pay, such as giving people awards etc. like Reddit. Despite being useless stuff, it might provide some fun that would make hardcore users want to pay. But for that to work out, all apps would also need to show the posts awarded in a different way, so I think thatβs unlikely.
But the point is that without a business model, the Fediverse will only be able to handle enthusiasts.
LW definitely can't handle more traffic than it already has. It already (thanks to the admins' refusal to update to the latest version of Lemmy) takes multiple days for LW content to get federated to other instances properly, which is why I've had to switch over to this alt account of mine because there are zero comments on this post in my main instance. With more users, that delay would grow from days to potentially weeks.
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I say give it three years and blue sky will just be a neolib twitter
Anybody who supports the definition of liberalism is an ally, imo.
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IMO bridgy is not well designed. The fact that it requires both the follower and the followee to specifically opt in basically makes it DOA. Both Mastodon and BlueSky are completely open and public in terms of post visibility, so bridgy should have been designed to require explicit opt outs from anyone who didn't want their content bridged.
Bridgy started without that requirement and it pissed off too many Mastodonians so they reworked it
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I think the uphill battle here is that a good amount of the active users on lemmy are probably very tech savvy. The percentage of us who arenβt, are doing it wrong in their eyes.
Dunno, I like the fact that people here are tech-savvy. My HS guidance counselor said I should always hang out with people that are smarter than I am. That's why I like it here, everypony seems so knowledgable.
