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’m ADHDing as hard as I can already bro
infodump harder
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.
This and the level of free speech that came with it is really needed right now. I don’t mean free speech in a go tell someone you disagree with to fuck their aunt type of way. I mean having real deep hard conversations about organizing and enabling movements. It feels like the Internet is scared of that because of monetization and content policies that have chopped the balls off of any form of organization or resistance. Like there’s so much shit I wish I could say but some mod policy kills it with a pinned post at the top of the comment section before I can even begin typing out my thoughts.
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
Welcome! A few pointers for you
I think 90% of my posts are deleted before sending because I just know that someone somewhere will find a way to be mad about it
But OK - here is a post that I would usually have deleted :)
As Someone Somewhere, I urge you to post more.
I cannot believe this account is two years old and not made just for this comment haha.
Oh, I’ve had the name for a lot longer than that.
I bow down to your sense of comedic timing
A genuine username checks out moment - excellent
OMG really? How COULD you…
Neglect to offer your valuable opinion. Hey, you’re a human and have valuable things to say. Haters gon hate. Fuck 'em.
I’ve also been posting less after managing to upset someone. We can have a club. The shy posters club.
You’re not shy, you’re just a normally adjusted human.
It’s normal to want to avoid being abused and insulted for, say, having an opinion which is marginally different to the in-group consensus. But unfortunately that’s what happens when we post on text-based social media. Apparently the medium does something to people’s minds, turning them into nasty vindictive unpleasant versions of themselves.
I’m a pretty self-confident person in real life and even I think twice about posting anything here that contradicts the prevailing groupthink. The inevitable insults and abuse and mockery are sometimes just not worth it.
There’s a lot more aggressive unpleasant people. Or bots. That’s the scary things these days, we don’t know what’s real anymore. People we talk to online or see. If it’s fake trumped up hysteria.
Or even takes pictures of videos.
And I don’t see it getting any better.
If we can ensure that all bots are always identifiable as such, i.e. that none of them are successfully passing themselves off as people, then this problem is mitigated quite a lot. In theory that’s feasible. We’re hardly even trying right now.
How’d you tell if you’re chatting to a bot?
Ai a pretty convincing now
Regulation, of course. Unlabeled bot on your platform? $100,000 fine. We’re not completely helpless.
It’s this the law or something you’d hope would happen?
Personally, I have hope that if a larger variety of people are posting and commenting (typical lurkers and such) then hopefully the echo chamber aggression will weaken a little, and hopefully foster a positive and friendly community. I’m trying to lead by example :)
Refreshing optimism!
if a larger variety of people are posting and commenting (typical lurkers and such) then hopefully the echo chamber aggression will weaken a little
Unfortunately I’m not sure the hope is warranted. Putting a lot of people with different views in front of each other, over text, does not, in general, by default, seem to go that well. At least not going by the experience of the first 30 years of the social internet. You tend to get the worst aspect of human group dynamics and speech-policing without the self-moderation that comes with in-person contact - i.e. the effect of audible voices, and visible faces and body language.
I’m not a complete pessimist or I wouldn’t be here. But I think these issues can only be solved by activist moderation that enforces rules with a light touch while remaining tolerant and always assuming good faith. And, of course, that kind of moderation is time-consuming and very, very hard. It’s a skill that hardly any communities have access to. But it is at least a reasonable goal.
I see where you’re coming from, historically the internet and large communities tend to foster that kind of aggression. I, for one, will be striving to build a positive environment though, and just maybe, we’ll see those fruits lead into a brighter future :). I myself am applying for some moderator positions to help take up that effort!
That’s great news. Good luck.
It’s normal to want to avoid being abused and insulted for, say, having an opinion which is marginally different to the in-group consensus.
Sadly, I see that irl as well - perhaps text social media enhances the effect, maybe by virtue of being anonymous, but it’s definitely not an effect solely restricted to here.😢
Source: me who it just happened to an hour ago.😑
Yep. Not letting abuse get to you is really hard. I’m constantly surprised by this, being a fairly resilient person and not very sociable (to put things politely). I can only imagine what it must be like for more gregarious people. Hardly surprising that people are scared to speak up. So good for you for saying what you wanted to say, there was value in that.
I’ve had abuse for posting a short story that validated the group think. Several times.
I’ve only just managed to overcome my membership in the shy posters club haha! Hey, keep a seat warm for me while I’m away, okay?
Thank you :), and I’ll just let you know, that this comment brought a smile to my face. I’m proud of you.
Over the years I’ve learned it’s ok to ignore if it seems like someone wants to pick a fight. Not everything has to be a debate, and no it doesn’t make you look weak. You just got better shit to do than argue with strangers on the internet. :)
I have never felt more heard - I am so glad that you did not delete this.:-)
I do that quite a lot too
Just remember that the people getting mad at you are not deleting any of their posts.
I’ve taken on the mantra of “Participate, but be respectful.” That’s led me to post a few times where I normally wouldn’t.
Realize that there is nothing wrong with pissing someone off because they disagree with you. It’s only wrong if you pissed them off because of how you said it, or if you are closed minded about being proven wrong.
And in the real world, a down vote doesn’t matter.
beautiful mantra, it’s philosophies like that which serve to build a kinder, more respectful world!
The trick, plumbercraic, is not minding that they will be mad.
That’s a horrible take and you should feel bad.
But I’m a stranger on the Internet and probably a moron so it’s ok to not take me seriously or respond to me.
I get this. I used to use Threads and someone got very angry at me cause I said Labour, supposedly the left wing party in the UK, are “upsetting the right people”, I should have clarified that I don’t think that they are doing a good job, but never mind.
thats reddit, ppl hate way less here, id prime myself to argue before I made a comment on reddit, made me a more argumentative person
It strongly depends where you go here - e.g. !ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net was too extreme even for Reddit, so yeah the average here is WAY more chill, but we also have even more extremes here than they did there, if that makes sense.
rule
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…
you’re right, but these forums also crowdsource information which can be sorely needed, such as debugging help and problem resolution. unless we provide an alternate hub for this, we aren’t likely to see the dominance of these common forums cease.
I see, my tip was thinking in meta/tiktok-like socials rather than reddit/stackoverflow-like. But I feel that it is not too much different. Probably the error was pouring so much knowledge in such “volatile” places (in the sense of user/community not really controlling it) in the first place, but aren’t human interactions already like that? Accept them as conversations lost in time, something always survive and returns, and new things always born. A pity, sure, but a part of life. In any case, it is quite unlikely to reach in a new place in barely a few years the same quantity of information than more than a decade of knowledge in old forums, yet I feel that pian piano people contributes to the shift… in the end we are humans which enjoy of social exchanges :D
Unexpected !dundermifflin@lemm.ee
I kinda started using lemmy less lately. I shall fix that!
We need to get more people to adopt the Fediverse. The issue is lack of engagement.
I jumped on board with the reddit API fiasco. I use Sync primarily since I’m familiar with the format and I browse and post often.
I think one problem is that it’s confusing to your average Joe. I honestly still don’t quite understand how it works. I see posts like .ml and .world and I have no idea what they are even though I’ve been here a while.
I see posts like .ml and .world and I have no idea what they are even though I’ve been here a while.
In a group email, you might see people from Gmail and Outlook as recipients. It doesn’t really matter that everyone, everyone can still see the emails and send them to each other.
Exactly. That’s the main barrier I think.
Also, the .ml and whatnot are just people on other instances.
It will get better with the massive bans
2025 year of the fediverse???
Jokes aside, i completely agree. Meta and Xitter completely shot themselves in the foot (lol) and pixelfed is gaining mainstream attention, and the new year just started!
I predict we’ll gain a massive influx of new users next year, due to the kindness of Zucc and Muskrat 😊
And who says they’ve never done anything good?
But yeah, let’s ride that momentum all the way into the year of the fediverse!
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 :(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.
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.
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
I put this into my hosts file a couple years back:
127.0.0.1 *reddit*
fuck reddit.
How do you know your accounts weren’t part of a ban wave? It doesn’t necessarily mean they linked them through your phone.
Because some of them, and their associated email accountsz hadn’t been used in years.
And there is nothing linking any of the emails / accounts except my.phone number.
Five email accounts, 20 odd reddit accounts. I’ve only used one account / email for the past year. And that’s from a PC / phone that were new around that time
!piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com (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.
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!
thank you for this post, did not know about the public forums list 😉
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.
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.
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.
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.
You’re probably right tbh
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.
Me too. I don’t get how people can’t get past the choosing a server and I’m not a techie. Like have you ever played a video game and had to join a server? It’s not that complicated! Lol. People are such lame giver uppers.
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.
sign up is confusing.
"Lemmy has 42k monthly active users
- https://discuss.online/ if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency)
- https://sopuli.xyz/ if you want a server located in the EU
- https://vger.app/ if you want an app
Feel free if you have any questions"
Further discussion on https://lemmy.world/post/24577309
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.
Try another server. I use r.nf and it’s very fast. Decentralisation is pointless if everyone flocks to the same server.
If people want freedom and independence, they’re going to have to a little work for it, because those things never come for free. And yes, that is a feature, not a bug. That “I should not ever have to engage my grey matter” mentality is the whole cause of the corporate fascist mess in the first place.
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.
-
All I want to ask of you is to just comment a few more times, …
I think I’m fully maxxed out.
God bless you 🫡
And that was after I’d been on kbin.social for six months.
The hero we need
I’m curious, how did you get those stats?
Thunder on Android. Its the best Lemmy app, if only it was less buggy :)
I use Eternity, personally (feels good after having used Infinity so long), just how good is Thunder now?
Eternity hasn’t been updated for two months, so i’d steer clear if possible.
Thunder is amazing, but there’s ONE bug that drives me insane. Some images have weird dimensions that you have to click on to fix.
Example:
Is there an open ticket for the dev to know?
Only this, https://github.com/thunder-app/thunder/issues/1617 and it’s been inactive
I’ll look into it, thanks!
Just took a look and wow, I think you might be right, haha. Be proud, you are the fediverse’s best soldier. 🏅
They’re squeezing water from a stone here DX
say, I hear you do something similar, Pug Jesus.
