Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy (www.404media.co)
from spaduf@slrpnk.net to fediverse@lemmy.world on 21 Jan 2025 22:08
https://slrpnk.net/post/17529585

#fediverse

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spaduf@slrpnk.net on 21 Jan 2025 22:10 next collapse

Checked the rules and I think this is allowed? But if you’ve still got reddit and don’t mind being a fediverse evangelist please go hit this thread: old.reddit.com/…/decentralized_social_media_is_th…

avidamoeba@lemmy.ca on 21 Jan 2025 23:04 next collapse

Did hit it. Keep servicing that thread, you’re doing well. It’s blowing up a bit.

Repost this in other communities in Lemmy. Shitpost, technology, etc.

avidamoeba@lemmy.ca on 21 Jan 2025 23:21 collapse

<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/b09ce396-81fa-4740-912f-85cb8ab71d31.png">

Oh no. Centralized social media fights back! 😂

spaduf@slrpnk.net on 21 Jan 2025 23:24 collapse

Damn we had a good run.

EDIT: We’ll Streisand em
<img alt="" src="https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/7a622252-cd6c-4cf3-aae2-f5dfe2e6c515.png">

avidamoeba@lemmy.ca on 21 Jan 2025 23:25 next collapse

What reason?

spaduf@slrpnk.net on 21 Jan 2025 23:29 collapse

Didn’t say but I’m pretty sure it’s because I edited to add lemmy specific information. In particular I mentioned the apps

avidamoeba@lemmy.ca on 21 Jan 2025 23:31 next collapse

Next time, make a new subreddit. 😂

Blaze@feddit.org on 21 Jan 2025 23:35 collapse

/r/Redditalternatives

Liyabuli@lemmy.world on 21 Jan 2025 23:36 collapse

I caught it in time, i am a fresh convert.

Blaze@feddit.org on 21 Jan 2025 23:38 next collapse

Welcome!

Blaze@feddit.org on 21 Jan 2025 23:39 next collapse

!newcommunities@lemmy.world is a good starting point

avidamoeba@lemmy.ca on 21 Jan 2025 23:43 next collapse

Welcome! Ask Qs, we’ll answer.

pelespirit@sh.itjust.works on 22 Jan 2025 00:43 next collapse

Welcome.

The biggest thing you have to learn is that everything defaults to “active” instead of “hot.” If it seems stale after setting the primary to “hot” in your settings, choose “top 6 hours” and “top 12 hours” to see more content. It’s not as addicting so it takes a little time to settle in to the calmness, but it’s great after you get used to it.

Ceres@lemmy.world on 22 Jan 2025 06:44 collapse

Thank goodness. You’re safe now with friends ❤️

Die4Ever@programming.dev on 22 Jan 2025 00:48 collapse

I think the join-lemmy.org link was fine, it seemed to get deleted when you edited in links to specific lemmy instances?

mesamunefire@lemmy.world on 21 Jan 2025 23:14 next collapse

Its all good!

ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 21 Jan 2025 23:18 next collapse

lmao clicked that link and one of the first comments I see is “reddit is pretty decentralized”

I get that 404 needs to make money but this article could greatly benefit from not being paywalled. Or at least list a definition of what decentralized social media is with some actual recommendations before the paywall because people clearly have no fucking clue

Serinus@lemmy.world on 21 Jan 2025 23:25 next collapse

I now have a dozen comments on Reddit in the last year, up from 3 an hour ago.

Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works on 22 Jan 2025 01:20 collapse

Especially for Redditors, Lemmy is such a no-brainer alternative. I think I’m gonna try to do more, and try to bring some of my audio communities out here by promoting Lemmy in the subs.

Sergio@slrpnk.net on 22 Jan 2025 03:15 collapse

Look at this for inspiration: pixelfed.fediverse.observer/dailystats

Someday it will happen for Lemmy again.

Serinus@lemmy.world on 21 Jan 2025 22:44 next collapse

It blows my mind that places like the transit systems that were on Twitter haven’t migrated over to their own Mastodon server. They’re not that hard to set up, and there’s so little risk when you just don’t accept public signups on your domain.

DharkStare@lemmy.world on 21 Jan 2025 23:22 next collapse

I agree. The Fediverse stuff is really well suited for governments and businesses. They can be in complete control of their instance, post whatever information they want distributed, and they don’t need to rely on any other business for it.

MajorHavoc@programming.dev on 22 Jan 2025 02:29 next collapse

Yeah. I’m surprised businesses haven’t been quicker to setup self-hosted Mastodon as their primary, and then mirror that to Twitter and Bluesky and such, for disaster recovery protection.

Excrubulent@slrpnk.net on 22 Jan 2025 05:27 next collapse

Businesses I understand because that involves listening to your tech guy and approving time for it, and businesses hate spending money, even if it wouldn’t really cost them that much in practice. They have a lot of institutional inertia.

fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 22 Jan 2025 18:01 collapse

You’d need something that is literally only a few clicks and it’s set up, and it auto updates with 0 user intervention. Until that happens your typical business will never want to touch their own hosted mastodon server.

MajorHavoc@programming.dev on 22 Jan 2025 18:23 collapse

Yeah. I think we’re waiting for the kind of installers and updaters that WordPress achieved before we see typical businesses running their own Mastodon server.

But I do think many organizations have got the risk/reward wrong, by underestimating the risk, at the moment.

chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 22 Jan 2025 06:28 collapse

From talking to someone involved in local government software, it seemed to me like there is a push in the opposite direction from that; they want and are moving towards offloading as much as possible to third party software vendors.

JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world on 21 Jan 2025 23:33 collapse

Completely agree! Seeing the dumb little logos all over timetables and the sides of buses always makes me roll my eyes. First they had to change the “t” logo to the bird, then that’s out of date on a billionaire’s whim and they have to replace it with the apocalyptic “X”. Come on guys, this is getting embarrassing. Stop treating big private companies like Daddy, it’s time to stand on your own feet. The tools are there.

Serinus@lemmy.world on 21 Jan 2025 22:53 next collapse

The thing about Mastodon for influencers is… you don’t even have to leave Twitter. Just post to both.

If enough people get into that habit, it makes the transition much easier for everyone.

jagged_circle@feddit.nl on 21 Jan 2025 23:30 next collapse

Please tell me how I can keep posting to twitter after I was banned for being a journalist?

ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca on 21 Jan 2025 23:33 next collapse

Make another account

jagged_circle@feddit.nl on 22 Jan 2025 03:05 collapse

That one got banned too. I can’t even signup for a lot of these services. I get banned before I even make a post.

pivot_root@lemmy.world on 22 Jan 2025 04:08 next collapse

You need to use a different device and IP address. IP addresses are a dead giveaway for someone trying to create a second account, and even with a different address, browsers are easy to reliably fingerprint.

The reason for using an entirely different device* is to prevent advertising crap baked into your software from sending Twitter or other platforms any unique advertising ID associated with one of your old, banned IP addresses.

*With careful setup, a virtual machine with a dedicated VLAN and internet connection would work.

Excrubulent@slrpnk.net on 22 Jan 2025 04:57 collapse

Honestly, if you’re going to do both, do bluesky and mastodon. Bluesky isn’t properly decentralised the way mastodon is, but a lot of influential people are there. Also it’s way better than twitter was.

Serinus@lemmy.world on 21 Jan 2025 23:36 collapse

My point was for people who are scared to leave Twitter. They don’t have to. They can just dip their toes in while still holding their Elon-themed blanket.

I understand that often you can’t just drop the platform where all the engagement is when your job is to promote something. However, you can still enable people who do want to make the switch.

sbv@sh.itjust.works on 22 Jan 2025 01:11 collapse

Twitter is very friendly to influencers because it automatically boosts popular posts and hashtags. Mastodon doesn’t by design, so they’re gonna have a much, much harder time there.

That’s an okay decision to take, but it makes it hard to grow the network because there’s a lower financial incentive.

MajorHavoc@programming.dev on 22 Jan 2025 02:18 next collapse

Mastodon doesn’t by design, so they’re gonna have a much, much harder time there.

In theory, yes. But what early switching folks are reporting is that the total impressions are much lower on Mastodon, but the total engagement is much higher, for the same effort.

Which is confusing unless we factor in what we know about Twitter farming bot account on purpose to create an inflated appearance of success.

Of course, there’s still the matter of Twitter genuinely has orders of magnitude more users. So as an either/or proposition, no way does it, yet, make sense to ditch Twitter for Mastodon.

But for the value-to-reach ratio, with the same effort applied to both, anyway, Mastodon is actually already a better value than Twitter.

All that to say, yeah, Twitter is better, purely due to the user base, and Mastodon’s algorithm actually treats creators better. Which we kind of already knew, as it was created by people fed up with Twitters abusive algorithms.

pivot_root@lemmy.world on 22 Jan 2025 03:56 collapse

Mastodon doesn’t by design

There is a trending section, and it does boost popular tags based on user interaction. It doesn’t shovel crap into personal feeds like traditional social media, but it’s not entirely lacking discovery features either.

nasi_goreng@lemmy.zip on 23 Jan 2025 10:25 collapse

Trending section often unusable and basically only rewards the majority (a.k.a Western fediverse).

If you host instance for non-English language for local communities, trending will quickly populated with Western/US-centric conversation and news.

[deleted] on 21 Jan 2025 22:57 next collapse

.

als@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 21 Jan 2025 22:59 next collapse

Archive link: http://archive.today/ztU6A

[deleted] on 21 Jan 2025 23:21 next collapse

.

Quill7513@slrpnk.net on 21 Jan 2025 23:27 next collapse

that’s what we want, yeah, but it won’t help us connect with the people we need to dislodge from the death cult.

solrize@lemmy.world on 21 Jan 2025 23:33 collapse

There is some discussion of that idea here:

pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/#…

jagged_circle@feddit.nl on 21 Jan 2025 23:35 collapse

Uh, no? We can’t organize if we lock up our information.

We need both. Public bullhorns and confidential communications.

solrize@lemmy.world on 21 Jan 2025 23:56 collapse

Yeah I just mean that if you want a bullhorn, even if you don’t order it from Amazon, you still donate training data to Amazon every time you use it. Obviously you might have to do that anyway, but there is a trade-off. You can’t completely escape.

jagged_circle@feddit.nl on 22 Jan 2025 03:04 collapse

So Amazon’s AI will learn “no war but class war” and “eat the rich”?

I really dont mind AI eating up public data.

CitizenKong@lemmy.world on 21 Jan 2025 23:21 next collapse

What’s happening right now is eerily close to the “Gleichschaltung” that happened after Hitler took over Germany, basically bringing all media in line with the will of the party and the leader. It was news media then, it is social media now. Because for many people, social media is their primary news source.

madeinthebackseat@lemmy.world on 22 Jan 2025 03:34 collapse

Will smaller alternatives be enough to upend their plans?

Excrubulent@slrpnk.net on 22 Jan 2025 05:09 collapse

The smaller alternatives will get bigger as the mainstream social media gets worse and worse. The job for us, in whatever way we can, is to build the alternatives and make them ready to handle the influx, and make them welcoming to new people.

jagged_circle@feddit.nl on 21 Jan 2025 23:30 next collapse

jagged_circle@feddit.nl on 21 Jan 2025 23:33 next collapse

Can someone please post the full article in the comments?

Die4Ever@programming.dev on 22 Jan 2025 00:56 next collapse

@spaduf@slrpnk.net idk if you saw my post about this in programming.dev/post/24371441

jaybone@lemmy.world on 22 Jan 2025 02:15 next collapse

How much of the fediverse runs on AWS and how willing do we think besos would be to pull the plug on those?

kat@orbi.camp on 22 Jan 2025 02:41 next collapse

Doing my part running my instances locally 🫡

avidamoeba@lemmy.ca on 22 Jan 2025 03:52 next collapse

Lemmy.ca will be moved on a fat server in Vancouver colo. Currently on cheap hardware in OVH. Not sure about .world. Probably similar. AWS is expensive. So Bezos would have to have Trump annex Canada before he’d be able to put his fingers on us.

qaz@lemmy.world on 22 Jan 2025 06:31 collapse

.world and a majority of the fediverse uses Hetzner afaik.

EDIT: According to Fedidb Hetzner is the most common ASN (excluding Cloudflare).

MisterFrog@lemmy.world on 22 Jan 2025 14:11 next collapse

They don’t control the domain registrar’s at least. Yet. (Or at least not de jure)

jaybone@lemmy.world on 22 Jan 2025 14:17 collapse

Don’t they have their own DNS? It’s called Route 53 I think?

Though I don’t think you are required to use it with your AWS hosts. But that’s not exactly what I meant by pulling the plug. They could quite literally pull the plug on your service. (Disconnect you from switches/routers, power off your hosts, etc.)

MisterFrog@lemmy.world on 22 Jan 2025 14:19 collapse

Oh indeed, don’t disagree there, we are as in most respects, at the mercy of our corporate overlords

moonpiedumplings@programming.dev on 23 Jan 2025 01:33 collapse

Not much, probably. For small scale usecase, like a VPS, AWS is horrifically expensive. For a 4GB of ram VPS, AWS is 30 USD a month, whereas you can get that for 10 USD a month, elsewhere.

AWS does this because of vender lock in. For the few times when a consumer of theirs needs a VPS (or some other service cheaper elsewhere, it’s less effortt to continue to use AWS than to go someplace else.

But for individuals and small organizations, like the fediverse servers, we can just start out on the cheaper options.

avidamoeba@lemmy.ca on 22 Jan 2025 03:35 next collapse

Go and sprinkle the simplest keywords in the thread - Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed - and tell them your experience.

Blaze@feddit.org on 22 Jan 2025 09:03 collapse

Add links as well, Lemmy onboarding can be very clunky: lemmy.world/post/24220536

Something like

“Lemmy has 42k monthly active users

  • discuss.online if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency)
  • sopuli.xyz if you want a server located in the EU
  • vger.app if you want an app

Feel free if you have any questions”

avidamoeba@lemmy.ca on 22 Jan 2025 16:05 collapse

I thought they’re removing posts with links.

Omgboom@lemmy.zip on 23 Jan 2025 13:44 collapse

Social media is a cancer on society.