It’s rough right now politically in the US. A lot of people around me seem like they’re ready to give up hope. It makes me incredibly angry seeing Zuck up there with all the other billionaires, and Elon is a parasite that has infected the government.
I often find myself wondering how I can make a difference. How can we regain control of our world?
Idk if I’m being dramatic, but the Fediverse really seems like it could be our response to these fuckers controlling the narrative on social media. It could be more than just an interesting decentralized social media platform. I really think this could be a key step in reclaiming our democracy.
Am I being dramatic lol? Do you all feel the same way? I was kinda getting emotional even. Like we could bring real change. That gives me hope, which is something we are desperately lacking right now.
It’s not just Lemmy. It makes me happy to see all the Fediverse platforms (specifically activity pub based) blowing up.
Friendly reminder if you have the financial means, donate to your instance, donate to the Lemmy devs, donate to Pixelfed or any other social media app fighting big social media. And better than a one-time donation, set up a monthly contribution even if it’s just $2/month. It really helps open-source developers when they have a steady income.
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Removed by mod
Fediverse? Maybe. It will stay small and not monetized. For some that’s good.
Lemmy? No hope. Lemmy and the pessimistic world views here give ME no hope for anything on this planet. I want to leave, but keep finding myself back here doom scrolling. Some communities seems good though. The platform is good though and seems to be picking up.
Specially for those of us who aren’t from the USA, there’s basically no content other than their news, a couple different hobby communities and the sellers from nsfw.
I also hope it stays not monitored, though I would happily pay $1/month to support running costs.
Agreed. This is the most cynical corner of the internet I’ve ever been to, yet here I’m.
Reddit is worse
Reddit is more diverse. The same kind of cynicism exists there too but it’s dilluted by all the other content so it’s easier to ignore. Here that is less the case as majority of the content is news articles - granted that I haven’t been to reddit for over a year so I don’t know what it’s like today.
It depends how you use these platforms. On reddit, I go to a few somewhat niche subs (via a direct bookmark link) so I don’t see any content outside of those specific niches.
On lemmy, I use this account for news/global politics, but I also have an alt where I only access content from subscribed communities and there is minimal politics.
I don’t think you’re dramatic.
For me it’s about reclaiming my right to participate in online discourse on my own terms. In a way the fediverse is freedom.
I plan on trying to self host a mastodon instance for myself and rebuild my blogs.
I don’t think I’d ever want to self host a lemmy, I like being anonymous to a reasonable degree. But I like that lemmy lets me have a voice without acquiescence to reddits enshittification.
Also the community is largely great. I love the memes, I love the comments and discussions, and I like that I learn things from fellow internet users again.
It gives me confidence. I know that now that I host my own lemmy, I cannot be randomly banned because I triggered some automatic spam filter with my scripts (happened in reddit), or banned because I talked back to the wrong mod. I know that our internationally distributed nature makes it harder to control top-down, so takeovers like Murk-Xitter are not possible. We can still be affected by disinfo campaigns and troll farms, and we unfortunately have weakened defenses against that, but I’m confident that a lot of smart admins and tooling providers will bunch together to figure out the countermeasures that will work.
oh snap, db0 the person! Love your instance.
How expensive is it to host your own instance? Assuming you aren’t doing it in house.
About 5-20 eur/month should be enough for most instance admins, depending on their provider.
Which do you use?
My setup is quite complex and I have 1000+ MAU so we’re not a small instance anymore. That said we use hetzner, ovh, and mailgun. Our hosting hosts are more than 100 per month but I could probably be running a bit cheaper if I wanted, but this way we have easy growing space.
That’s much more expensive than I would imagine! Hope you are fully funded. You’re the best instance.
Yes, currently the monthly donations exceed our hosting costs!
Yeah, being banned because a mod didn’t like you was the worst thing on Reddit. Especially if they modded multiple subs and banned you from a subreddit you never even came close to breaking the rules on. Some Reddit mods were just assholes.
…abd this goes on anticorporate. Thank you very much. And yes, I think it does and we do make a difference. Keep it up. Organize and search for people like yourself. Instead of turning the naysayers one by one and burning out, find your allies and spread the word efficiently. Think of the ideal situation and make it happen. I‘m here, lets fucking go (same mission, different continent)!
It seems like the only semi-viable alternative to oligarch run social networks.
I am not American, but behaviour exhibited by oligarchs such as Zuckerberg/Musk (and these are just the ones that get in the news) is not at all surprising.
it does. as an mbin cheerleader, its heartwarming to see the disparate AP based servers communicating with my server. lemmy/friendica/mastodon etc… knowing that no entity could control all those products. the key of course is the protocol and maintaining ActivityPub as functional, standardized service.
Absolutely.
For me it does. I’m really enjoying Lemmy, and have curated a bunch of communities that I follow and participate in in a way that feels helpful, hopeful, and not toxic.
It gives me memes and that’s close enough
I like Fediverse because I get much better engagement with people here than anything else
I made a post about a blender project I am working on from my Mastodon and tagged the Lemmy community. This project is pretty dear to my heart, and I wanted it to be seen by many people, so I made the same post on Reddit.
I got 35 stars on Mastodon + 80 upvotes on Lemmy + many cool comments.
I got literally no upvotes on Reddit. maybe skill issue on my side but the Fediverse is, in my general experience, so much better when it comes to engagement.
It’s cause no one on Reddit goes past r/hot on their sorts. If it isn’t found by people in New and given an initial boost, it dies there. Plenty of stuff has died with 3 up votes while a repost that has a bot farm behind it hits r/all every other week. Reddit now is a feed people scroll with no interaction; bots with an agenda and a select few users interact with stuff.
It feels much more social being here not despite the smaller audience, but because of it.
People have time to respond to me if I have a question, and I have time to give really good and complete responses to anyone that asks me about something I post.
Using the Fediverse feels like a small step in the right direction. Big changes are built on lots of small steps. I would say move in the direction of using the Fediverse more, the old alternatives less, and think of more small steps in the right direction you can do. I don’t think just using the Fediverse is enough, but it is an important step to take. Keep going.
I agree! Another small step - though I do enjoy the like-minded crowd - would be to get some different perspectives here. Even if I don’t necessarily agree with all those ideas, I don’t think it’s healthy for my own ideas to be trapped in an echo chamber.
Corporations might accidentally help if they try to make their own instancss, like if you sign up with google to join the fediverse, realize most instances block googles because its corporate, then they make an account at non corporate version.
I think the best way for it to grow would be making it easy to self host, yunohost maes it pretty easy, but more managed hosting options competing or more of the big ones offering it would go a long way.
Fediverse as a technology yes but the userbase here does the opposite. By definition someone commenting on a message board is not a normal person because normal people don’t do that, but to be commenting on a niche platform like this makes you hyper not-normal, and yes, that applies to me as well and I’m well aware of that.
Commenting on a message board is a lot more normal now than it used to be. Facebook, Reddit as well as comment sections on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc. are fairly mainstream things by now, I would consider all of these forms of message boards.
And isn’t it our job to normalize Lemmy as much as Reddit has been normalized? Though I guess that depends on your goals for Lemmy. I would like to see it overtake Reddit. Whether that’s an unrealistic goal or not, I say we aim for the stars and see how far we go.
The Fediverse and open source world do give me hope. But my worry is seeing people not adopt them. I know they aren’t pertect but compared to the big tech alternatives they’re a no oasis.
The Fediverse is a sewer of antisemitism, and antisemitic censorship
How so? And what do you define as “antisemitism” and “antisemitic censorship”?
