John Oliver promoted alternatives to big tech in last night's episode, including Mastodon and Pixelfed
from otter@lemmy.ca to fediverse@lemmy.world on 24 Feb 2025 15:28
https://lemmy.ca/post/39653865
from otter@lemmy.ca to fediverse@lemmy.world on 24 Feb 2025 15:28
https://lemmy.ca/post/39653865
It’s brief, around 25:15
youtube.com/watch?v=nf7XHR3EVHo
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 :)
threaded - newest
.
I see a lot of anti Zionist stuff here. but nothing anti Semitic.
just my 2c.
Yup. I’m always wary of people lumping anti zionism, anti Israel government, and anti semitism all in the same bag.
Nice try Jacob
Is this a problem unique to the Fediverse, or is this a case that it's more rampant here? Or does it only seem like it?
My feeds are fairly well curated, or perhaps you might say "blinkered", so I don't see a lot of it. Or maybe I don't see what's right in front of me, which is why I ask, since you definitely see it better than I can.
(This is not an attempt at a bad faith argument; I'm firmly anti-anti-Semitism, and I'm not saying it's not there. Frankly, I'd be surprised if there wasn't any. Anywhere there's people, their prejudices generally follow.)
.
Weapons grade balognium. There’s ml and Lemmygrad, sure, but that’s not “most” instances by a long shot.
If BlueSky is full of Jew hate, “it’s legion”, but you’re still using it over Mastodon and Mbin, doesn’t that contradict the idea that antisemitism makes a platform unattractive? If it were your main issue, wouldn’t both be equally bad? Seems like the deciding factor is engagement for you personally, not what moderation happens or doesn’t happen.
If antisemitism were the real deal-breaker, you wouldn’t be on BlueSky either.
Stop conflating "Jewish" with "Israel".
It's been 3 hours and your comment is still here...
"Moderate" no, "Influence" yes. I see what you seemed to be trying to say: the Lemmy codebase *is* fairly authoritian e.g. lacks any way to contact a mod to find out why something was removed, even going so far as to obscure the name of the account that did it, simply saying "mod".
So them being the ones who provide the codebase definitely "influences" us here, but on the other hand they provide the code for free, and anyone at all could make a fork off from it, and administer their own instance however they see fit. Or, as K/Mbin, PieFed, and Sublinks have all done, make their own
Reddit replacementThreadiverse software entirely from scratch.See e.g. !fediverselore@lemmy.ca (here's a start to a post) that proves that people on the Fediverse are allowed to criticize the main Lemmy developers, while still using Lemmy software.
On a personal note I will add: we can respect certain aspects of those people, even as we criticize other aspects, just as we do the same internally inside of our very selves.
What did Lemmy do that made him a monster?
Having seen many of your comments across lemmy, I feel like you equate a lot of criticism of the state of Israel’s policies and actions with antisemitism. I acknowledge people who hate Jews exist and are definitely on the internet, but I find knee jerk accusations of antisemitism to be intellectually lazy.
seriously - too many people see criticism of Israel's government and read it as condemnation of all Jews. As if it's the case that that government represents all Jewish people worldwide (or even all Jewish people in Israel...!)
It's like people are thinking that wanting Israel to stop its genocide also means there should be another genocide targeting Jews?? Nuance beyond that sort of black-and-white polarized viewpoint seems to be increasingly dead.
The lack of nuance when discussing that conflict is one of the biggest issues I have. So many people seem to see it as “The Israeli genocide is bad, therefore Hamas is good”. In reality, you have shitty people with power fighting shitty people without power, and civilians getting shafted by both.
Jack isn’t involved with BlueSky anymore. He left the board when they told him to fuck off with his push to get rid of moderation.
I’ve got nothing to add to the other replies on your mischaracterization of antio-Zionist as anti-Semitism.
Jack is still the single largest shareholder of private Bluesky stock (beacause he founded it and never ceded his controlling percentage to anyone) "The Foundation" controls a certain amount, Jack controls the rest, surprise, the "leaving BlueSky" was his agreed stepping away from the board, dude didn't give up his stock, lol. If anyone tells you Jack isn't involved with BlueSky any more, you should really block them for either being willfully ignorant, or purposefully mistrustful.
And what about the antisemitism claims?
Oh vraiment?
www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8dm0ljg4y6o
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky#:~:text=It is owned….
Sure thing. 👍
Oh come on, it’s not like you’re any better yourself. I’ve seen your comments around lemmy, and most were racist towards arabs.
I don’t recall doing any of that.
Anti zionism =/= anti semitism.
I'm Jewish myself and I completely agree with you.. Sadly it exists on a pretty much every social media, but BlueSky has a unique feature called sharable block lists/mute lists, I believe they call it "stacked moderation", I've subscribed to a few of those and it has blocked 90% of antisemites/terrorism sympathisers, I kinda wish some Fedi platform would have a similar feature as well
This is fantastic to see.
It’s crazy how the wind changed. Does anyone remeber the almost exact same thing 4 years ago, when people on the right side of political spectrum shared alternatives to big tech from their point ov view? GAB.COM, PARLER, BRAVE, DUCKDUCKGO etc
XD
Duckduckgo? That’s just a search engine, no?
I agree on the rest of the parts tho
Yeah, odd inclusion. Duckduckgo is indeed a search enginge, but it’s essentially just a front end for Bing.
Sadly yes :( i’ve been keeping an eye on mojeek, hopefully it’ll get better.
Ecosia is building a custom search engine index, ETA summer 2025
Very interesting, thanks for telling me - i recall them sharing your IP with bing/google? but since they’re building their own, this may change. I’ll keep an eye on this, thank you
Probably not, they sell your traffic data to plant trees, they’re not privacy oriented its just that their greed serves a common good.
I’m so looking forward to that!
That sounds amazing!
DDG and Brave were pushed as “censorship free” alternatives, back when I was looking into covid disinformation, because the very obviously fake websites would sometimes rank higher on them
There may be more to it though
I’ve heard all kinds of bad rumours about Brave but idk if any of it is true.
They’re balls deep in crypto but even the crypto bros don’t buy their bullshit
reddit.com/…/brave_browser_scam_a_fake_privacy_br…
I mean yeah, doesnt matter. The point is people shared alternatives to big tech just like folks who are not in the power right now. Cause apparently x is musk’s and it looks like the consensus is that rest of big tech is siding with Trump for profit
I mistook it as you saying DDG is alt-tech. My mistake
How is Brave right wing? Because of cryptocurrencies?
It’s not explicitly rightwing.
A couple years ago Musk was recommending Signal.
It’s just an example of right wing people recommending alternatives.
The CEO is problematic and right wing, for examples see the most recent paragraphs in his career section on Wikipedia en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich
Wait, the Mozilla guy who got pressured to resign over opposition to gay marriage is the Brave guy?? Fuck him lol.
Unsurprising he’s also a dipshit about COVID.
“b-b-but he made javascript!!1!”
r/browsers on reddit is as dumb as rocks.
Brave’s business model is a crypto scam wrapped in a protection racket. It man-in-the-middles the site’s ads, replacing them with Brave’s own, then holds the revenue hostage unless the site gives legitimacy to Brave’s crypto by accepting it as payment.
For comparison, “normal” ad-blocking consists of an end-user exercising his property right to control the operation of his own computer by programming it not to display the ads at all.
Hopefully you can see how the thing Brave does is very different, and much more ethically fraught.
In both cases it was primarily performative for Americans but this time there will be considerable chunk of Europeans who will be looking to leave big tech for services in non-hostile countries.
Does that
Late ShowLast Week Tonight with John Oliver have a presence in the Fediverse?Someone on mastodon told me, if you haven't found someone on fedi, you are probably not looking hard enough. But no, I don't think they are on fedi
Someone is wrong lol. NFL, for example, cannot do anything outside of Twitter at this time. They are apparently working on it, but it’s gotta be implemented league-wide, so it’s taking some time. Idk if they’re even trying to get onto Mastodon, last I heard it was just Bluesky.
This is a large org with hundreds of millions of fans, with no presence on Fediverse really. I’m sure there are mirror accounts, but none are official.
Good question. Would love that!
lemmy.world/post/25998432
.
You mean Last Week Tonight? The Late Show is Colbert.
I do 🥺
Mom we are on the TV!
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/4343e50a-5a02-45a3-8187-ccc5be948c25.png">
technically we are federated, so kind of?
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/7ad01b23-e844-4e1a-a625-1dbab4ccfb48.png">
<img alt="" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ZKhhmZFyBhg/TNBaP13C9GI/AAAAAAAAA0g/CxVSIuCFR_Q/s1600/Sully+and+Mike+on+TV.png">
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/1a5a8a35-e1e3-4697-a20d-98e6a7abd73c.jpeg">
Anyone have a link that works for Canadians, you MONSTERS?
You have to use a VPN.
I just got it on the dl instead
🇺🇸❤️🇨🇦
peertube2.cpy.re/w/rq6WfwnQTiHfpoWhURLNBS
Thanks!
Is the video seriously region blocked in Canada, but not in Russia?
<img alt="" src="https://discuss.tchncs.de/pictrs/image/32967961-ed23-4af0-ac74-2eb8ac4680b6.jpeg">
<img alt="Screenshot_20250224_153612_Firefox Nightly" src="https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/05956235-99dd-4540-a1bd-65e96d72e76e.jpeg">
Indeed it is, that is such a weird block
I may be wrong, but I think it’s because some company owns the rights to the show in Canada and doesn’t want people watching it on YouTube
One of the few decent TV hosts. His reporting on Palestine breaks with the anti-Palestinian censorship that dominates US media.
I wish he had mentioned Lemmy, but it’s understandable that he didn’t. Also Bluesky isn’t an alternative to big tech, it IS big tech. I wish it wasn’t stealing so much of our publicity lately.
But beggars can’t be choosers, and we have seen some nice growth over the past couple months. John Oliver fans are the perfect candidates to join the fediverse, hopefully some of them find their way to Lemmy.
Agreed, but at least Bluesky is a public benefit corporation, so it supposed to take in the needs of society as well as profit in its decision-making. That may not be much, but it's a start.
I’m not familiar with the details of that, but it seems like more of a red herring to me. A form of controlled opposition to divert people away from truly revolutionary platforms.
Of course it has to seem like a plausible alternative, but is it actually decentralized or altruistic enough to make a meaningful difference? I think not.
“Public benefit corporation” is such an oxymoron, I know it’s cliché to say this but it reads like something out of 1984.
If your goal is truly to benefit the public, why wouldn’t you start a non-profit? It’s because they want profits, which will always be at odds with the interests of the public.
Because your non-profit isn’t likely to go anywhere; Capitalists don’t give significant money to non-profits, but they’ll invest in a public benefit corporation because of the potential for profit. The corporation can then take their money and use it for whatever public benefit it intends to work towards. It’s a workaround to try and scrape some benefit to society out of capital, that otherwise wouldn’t exist.
Whether Bluesky is actually a good example of a public benefit corporation or not, I have no idea, I don’t use it.
Their protocol allows for federated relay servers, but I’m not aware of anyone having done the exercise of launching one.
That’s because, to my understanding, the prerequisite to be able to launch one is “handle the raw, unfiltered firehose of all the traffic on the entire platform”. A relay has to be a mirror of the entire company’s hosting infastructure, and you’d have to essentially do it for free. It’s no puzzle to me why no one’s done it yet.
Ah, yeah that makes sense then. They’re over 30M active users now.
You’re absolutely right, but as a UxD, until these platforms learn UxD, they’ll never work. They can’t.
It doesn’t matter how great they are, the vast majority of people won’t learn. And they shouldn’t have to. That’s why big commercial apps are better – good designers need to eat, and big companies can pay for their eggs.
It doesn’t matter how good your model is, without great UxD, you’re dead in the water.
Chances are it’s really just that, a start. See OpenAI.
“Public benefit corporation” is a meaningless designation. All it means is they have the option of putting their mission over their shareholders, not that they are obligated to do so.
So twitter didn’t make money anyways, this is a better way for them to hold power
If I was losing money and wanted to mantain control over the public id become a public benefit corp too
I’m really not happy about bluesky their fragmentation of the fediverse protocols is only going to harm us in the long run.
Intentionally, I think.
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.
Bridgy started without that requirement and it pissed off too many Mastodonians so they reworked it
Well fuck the mastodonians their stupidity is no reason to make everyone else’s experience shitter.
I would have put it in less harsh terms, but yes, basically this.
The fediverse hoa had a bit of a problem with it, ignoring the fact that federation is opt out by default.
Yes, but it’s not relevant to the point I was making
That’s what I suspect
Bluesky was always twitters goal, they were losing hella money, so they devloped blue sky.
shrug, I wish they were with us, but they are also a big ole corporate entity, so I’m kind ok with us staying our our side of the fence. As they need to implement payment and corporate protections to their network, we’re free to be free over here.
We don’t have to play ball. not with them anyway,
I think, If we have any credible threat, it’s going to be from the Governmental gross anti-tampering laws, forced moderation, or backup regulations. They could make it legally difficulty for us to exist.
This. I have considerable concern that Fascists will straight up ban Fedi if enough people shift to it. They don’t like not being able to control everything, Fedi is far too much actual freedom of communication.
The thing about fedi is how do u stop it. Ban every instances ip? make it illegal to use? They can try but they will have very little success.
They’d shut down large instances, pressure WordPress to remove support, in the US at least, it could be seen as too risky, if they wanted to they would find a way. I don’t think this would happen easily in the EU though.
You make laws like the Online Safety Act in the UK. You then attach a multi-million dollar fine to anyone who doesn’t adhere to the bonkers unenforceable stipulations in the text.
All of a sudden, no one but a corporation with a legal department can safely run an instance without putting their money and eventually freedom on the line.
They might not be able to just stop it, but you can force us into a pirate scenario where we have to do it in the dark.
We are likely starting to slowly head into 1984 territory. IF Fascim continues to rise, eventually, non-state-run media will be deemed unlawful and they’ll do what they can to make it go away.
This is why fedi needs to support federation over tor
When they get serious about encryption they will make tor illegal as well.
Tor will not hide you from the feds once they decide they really want to go after encryption. They can either own enough endpoints to find you directly or simply go and shut down all the endpoints. Or, If they have other IP leaks that are unpublished…
On the upside they are firing most of the competent people in government so there’s a chance the CIA can’t do that anymore
If china has failed to stop tor I doubt the us can do much better
Blocking tor at the firewall level isn’t difficult. Anything with packet inspection can do it.
Edit: I’ve looked into this some more and you’re kinda right. It’s SSL and with very little to give it away except talking to exit nodes. Most of the systems I’m looking at are just discerning it from IP, the few exceptions require SSL MITM, which I also wouldn’t put by the government.
They can inspect the target ip but then u can just bridge it. I wrote a tor implementation from raw websockects.
since most federation happens over the backend, you could access an instance based outside the usa through tor.
This; I’m so sick of hearing it pop up when people mention alternatives.
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?
Oh I agree. I’m just not there because twitter was never my thing. Keep up the fediverse propaganda, comrade.
I’m not sure anyone mentions bluesky as an alternative to big tech.
Pretty sure they only mention it as an alternative to musk/X.
This right here, the everyday person doesn’t know what federation is let alone believes that it’s an alternative to federated platforms. They see it as a better Twitter that’s not run by Musk and honestly that’s all they need to know.
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 aren’t, 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.
Fully Agree.
Mastodon, Lemmy and the likes are all enthusiast platforms in my eyes. Their primary userbase of the more savvy folk who are early adopters. I also believe it’s why many don’t fully get how complicated the fediverse really is to comprehend. To many the hurtles are just costs of being in the field/having a tech passion, hopefully it will be adopted but like, I still think the UI and general behavior and mechanics of it will be a fairly big roadblock.
They haven’t gone through the churn of corporate emshittification enough yet I’d have to guess.
Err… why are we suggesting the corporate-owned and centralized bluesky over Mastodon then?
Oh right, viral marketing and useful idiots. I shouldn’t have expected more.
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 that’s when the owner isn’t handling the costs themselves. I’m not sure how well most instances have right now.
Maybe Lemmy would benefit of some way to get people to pay, such as purchasing the ability to give 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 that’s unlikely.
But the point is that without a business model, the Fediverse will only be able to handle a limited number of enthusiasts before it faces scaling problems.
yup. no question. Not one instance mind you, but Reddit is also a giant cluster. (and clusterfuck)
We just need the big bois to stop stuffing themselves. There’s 0 reason to have 2/3 of the totally traffic flooding into world because people are scared of Federation that they never even have to deal with.
Maybe we make some premium pay servers with baller architecture, killer response time, user capacity limits and high speed storage?
Eventually, it’s going to be ads, donations or payments. It’s all someone else’s computer, someone has to foot the bill. But at great scale, you should be able to have an ad-free experience for something in the range a dollar or two a month.
I wouldn’t mind having some ads, but I wonder how some more extremists users would react.
But I strongly believe that depending on donations is a very tough place to be, it places the burden of “begging” on the instance owners, which are already doing all the work and should definitely be compensated somehow.
That’s why I donate monthly to my instance :)
A pretty decent sized instance managed will uses a few boxes and some CDN, runs a couple to a few hundred a month, it doesn’t take that many people paying to cover it.
It’s not as bad managing the smaller instances. The app works like it says on the tin until you get really big.
IMO lemmy.world let themselves get WAY bigger than they should have. They had to start doing a hell of a lot more work to keep the thing up.
If you get a good deal on hosting then, on medium-sized instance donations easily cover costs. lemmy.world suggests this can scale up a lot even if you need more complex systems in place to deal with demand.
It costs me less than $10/mo to run mine and some of that is because I have to pay for an email forwarder until my hosting provider lets me start sending emails, part of that is factoring the cost of the domain name. The actual cloud server costs $5/mo right now.
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.
Isn’t it easier to handle most users on one server than it is to have a bunch of equal servers? Then the problem just moves off the one server towards the communication between the servers being the bottleneck.
The way lemmy (and federation) works, it needs to do a bunch of operations that can’t happen simultaneously, so there’s a job queue. The queue needs to do some database operations and a bunch of communication operations and each of the jobs needs to reach out to distant servers that may or may not be overwhelmed themselves.
You start with one server it costs almost nothing to host. Sooner or later you want to split out the job servers, then you end up needing to split out the database, when you start getting that many people on your server now you want to consider fault tolerance, Even after tuning you can only fit so many simultaneous users on a web server, you end up needing to do some load balancing. The next step would be trying to split it up geography-wise.
That’s scaling up and it’s what big companies do and it’s very expensive but easy for a small team to manage.
Lemmy on the other hand is designed to be scaled out, running smaller individual user bases on lighter hardware with a bunch of individual administrators instead of a organized team.
If people want to be on a large single cluster application Reddit is still there.
I like what we have a lot better.
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, which fixes this issue) 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.
Too late - we are already here!:-P
<img alt="img" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn%3AANd9GcRa-kmGC6Nf7ICtwimQbgKMXg3pdRnlkoMMVg&s=">
How can anyone not love the guy?
I think he plays the awkward card to actual cringe levels at times but I’ll also watch Cody’s Showdy so that can’t be it entirely.
Can’t say I love him, but I do appreciate the work he does.
Haha, yeah Cody has definitely made me cringe out of discomfort before. I haven’t watched that guy in awhile! Appreciate the reminder. And Oliver can get close to that level too, for sure.
The recent Trump is going to hurt his voters video is pretty good.
Did you know Dan O’Brien writes for LWT?
This was literally the photo that finally got me banned from Reddit years ago.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/b254ad3c-9572-4079-8379-555b3587b4d7.jpeg">
I agree, but I also think we should remember a loss for musk is a win for society
Indirectly, looking up “John Oliver Mastodon” brings up this post in the top few. “John Oliver Pixelfed” has this post as the first option
So we’re not completely left out :)
Exactly, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Someone using BlueSky over Twitter is a good thing.
We still shouldn’t be doing the dirty work of rich people for them.
We should all be promoting Mastodon over the centralized and corporate-owned bluesky.
Talk to John Oliver then.
There are plenty of naive people on here also shilling bluesky over Mastodon.
Over or in addition to? I haven’t seen anyone say BlueSky over Mastodon.
Get your eyes checked.
For fuck’s sake, no need to say ableist shit like that. I’m just saying I haven’t seen it, not that 100% hasn’t happened.
John Oliver being uploaded to YouTube is awesome! I should comment that Lemmy is a great Reddit alternative
Awesome!
I’m going to assume this was Daniel O’Brien’s doing… because he’s the only Last Week writer I know specifically.
Would be nice if he promoted more fediverse platforms like Mbin :) Missed opportunity.
I guess they weren’t picked as they don’t have official apps. Most people look for those first.
I don’t understand the point of installing a web browser that only runs one website.
Mbin also support PWA indeed, but we also have Interstellar.
Interstellar is the official Mbin app: https://joinmbin.org/apps
using it now. but I have to say the Lemmy apps are just much note enticing, NGL.
you can help jwt with Interstellar, its open source. https://github.com/jwr1/interstellar
Would like to get my family on Signal. I deleted my facebook account and now we use various other chat apps that I don’t quite like
I’ve never understood why people just can’t send messages through text. Like why do they need a special app in order to do it.
I don’t use Facebook myself and my family members just started texting me and honestly it’s so much easier
Don’t get me wrong, I definitely think that signal is more secure. I just don’t understand why people just install another app in order to communicate with their family, just let them know you’re available through text
edit: I want to clarify that I may not have been clear/missed saying in this post, I’m not saying people shouldn’t(if people would change I would love it), I’m saying I don’t understand why people do knowing that your family members aren’t going to care and are just going to text you anyway as has been my experience
SMS is incredibly antiquated as soon as you want to do anything multimedia, or heck sending an SMS longer than 144 characters.
My mother received a video over SMS the other day and it legitimately looked like it was filmed on a Nokia 6310.
I’ve encouraged my family to use Signal to replace SMS and it functions really well as an SMS upgrade. It’s more secure, private, supports sending decent quality multimedia, the interface is simplistic, it has formatting, does video calls well, and you can send a long message without it being a hacked together string of 5 messages.
From both a security and usability perspective, it wins out on SMS in my opinion.
Edit: there’s also the nightmare of group chats with SMS. I hate when extended family try to use it
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 install another app, 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.
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)
Maybe you want to communicate through an encrypted service?
i imagine its because text messages are saved by your provider and can be used or accessed by law enforcement even if deleted. but that may or may not be an issue for most people swapping recipes or talking to their family about normal every day stuff.
Yeah I believe that, the people I have on my signal are generally ones that are worried that the cops are going to track them or something. I fully agree that privacy is important, unfortunately my family and the general public care is significantly less
SMS is a pain in the ass. iOS users aren’t using SMS, they’re using a proprietary system which is inaccessible to android users. Occasionally a 1-on-1 text works with RCS but it’s janky
IOS has had native RCS since they launched IOS 18 back in like August/September-ish, I haven’t had much issue with support from IOS to Android RCS side, but I’m not sure what my family in Florida use for their iphones, I expect older models might struggle. I have however had issues with communicating with my mom, but I believe it’s because she doesn’t understand that when she has RCS enabled, and she turns off data, it wants to try using RCS, then fails, and then falls-back to SMS, which for some reason Samsung Messages struggles with.
Personally speaking though, my S20 hasen’t had any issues with RCS period, its always been other devices not actually sending proceeding to error and then the person not noticing it so therefore not retrying
My step dad actually got my family on signal YEARS ago and I will never be more thankful.
I’m sure he’s going to be facing lawsuits from Краснов and Wormtongue any day now.
I don’t get it
Dipshit in chief and his butthurt-prone sidekick will probably sue.
Not Lemmy though. Based.
Yeah I think it’s best we don’t advertise this place. It’s a little strange.
It’s no different than reddit, DIGG, or the Something Awful forums before they got popular.
Which is why it’s based that it wasn’t promoted
As long as no one sells off Lemmy, which is impossible now…
Come to Lemmy, we got: blood thirsty Linux users, furries, femboys, communists, and tankies. Also, porn.
Often most of those at the same time.
A flying squid, too.
Wait how is Squid this popular? 😂
Its not, this incident will be reported to the nearest democracy officer.
I’d say it is more notoriety than popularity.
He has the most posts and comments on the Lemmy activity scoreboard.
That’s a lot
Mother of God, I did not realize that he’s pushing 70k comments.
Btw are you just joking or isn’t there actually a tool that checks Lemmy profiles and gives a neat little scorecard with some stats? I remember reading a thread where someone linked it but that was a while ago.
The ios app Mlem shows a scoreboard of users in the search tab. Also Thunder has a monthly contribution stats on user profiles.
Ok cool. Tfw there are so many great apps for Lemmy but you can only use one at a time 😔
Also dull people
Thanks (・–・) \(・◡・)/
Don’t forget Margot Robbie
The Picard Maneuver “Am I joke to you?”
Where is this abhorrent content? I need to know so i can avoid it…
Is sh.itjust.works not federated with lemmynsfw.com? Or maybe you use a Front page or Local feed. Here on world (no comment on the instance wars), lemmynsfw communities pretty regularly show up on my All feed. Seems like whatever they do with posts over there really makes the “Active” sorter happy, if you know what I mean
It definitely was federated back when I made my acct here, as I had to block it lmao.
That’s what I was wondering. For a while I swear naked images of Rinkunn were more prevalent than The Picard Maneuver. I’m an All user mostly out of curiosity but disappointed that I think world defederated from one of the major furry ones cause that dropped considerably.
Wait, is disappointed the right word? I guess it is, although maybe i just miss their positivity. I’m still cool with hexbear being defederated, after all. Lol
Don’t forget the Trekkies.
There we go. I was waiting to be represented.
I see a lot more Trek memes here than on reddit and I love every one
The porn is sadly lacking, actuallly.
How much do you need!!!
What exactly does a DragonTypeWyvern tail look like? Is it long with scales?
Depends on the kind of wyvern
What about the dragon type?
That’s all wyverns. Reddit is demonstrably and embarrassingly wrong.
Be the change you want to see
Ain’t nobody wanna see that.
Only you
Being humble is sexy!
Honestly I might get more active in posting, cause some of the content I wanna see is not active/has one person posting on the community. I rarely post on any social media, but the fediverse just sparks something in me to make it a more active place.
Thanks, Stefon.
Don’t forget the No Poop Challenge
*porn involving some or all of the above
And knives.
And beans.
Well, reddit has nothing at this point, so it’s better than the competition.
It has its own charm once you get used to it lmao
The charm is why I keep coming back. Especially when it comes to the Lemmy Charm comments for lemmynsfw.com.
On Reddit I looked at so many posts on one day, on Lemmy I read like 2 posts but go in the comments much more often. Actually I look at more comments than posts, which I find better!
It’s good to have some friends, but don’t let too many normies in…
We reached a point a while ago where yall saying shit like this became the “normies”
Ohh it’s normal for us. But there are still a lot of sports all-consuming, rabble rousing, linux hating, clue collar people still on Reddit, any I don’t mind them staying over there.
Nieche communities are very quiet here though.
They are, probably even too quiet. But the level of griefers, bots and trolls is very very low, and selfishly, I REALLY like that.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/7901ff35-2ceb-4370-ba6b-b7ab6ae0fa1b.gif">
I could see people promoting Piefed and Mbin instead.
We need to get more people in here if we want it to actually be a Reddit competitor. Right now it’s good for some communities, but smaller ones are still extremely underpopulated.
I've seen the moist cat mbin instance being promoted a few times in RedditAlternative before I move here, actually. it's one of my considerations jumping instances actually.
Not based.
Senpai noticed me!!
Is that mpv 👀someone tell that n00b that Bluesky is not an alternative
It’s fun for now until the state gets a hold of it. They’ll be over here sooner or later, just let them trickle in and get everyone used to it.
True. For now I’m happy to just see Twitter lose.
Yeah, the important thing is to get people off the Big Web, we can work on getting them their forever home later.
I feel like there’s a buddhist lesson about impermanence here.
It is to twitter.
Are we that degenerate already??
YES! #winning
Cool, everybody can build these companies up so that they can launch their IPOs and be controlled by a new board of directors fresh from wall street. It will all be so different.
Not commenting on Bluesky, but the others have taken steps to differentiate themselves
Mastodon was handed over to a non profit
theverge.com/…/mastodon-non-profit-ownership-ceo-…
Signal has been under a nonprofit
signalfoundation.org
Being open source also means that people can fork the apps if something changes, or apps + server code in the case of a lot of fediverse software
The whole point of federation is that that can’t really happen, or at least they can fuck a single server, but not the whole ecosystem.
So thats why it was slow for a while.
.
Not friendica, which seems an obvious facebook alternative.
Also, I think they’re onto something with their fuck it approach that every social media platform would benefit from. The internet was mostly that before. Content moderation primarily serves advertisers, it was never really for the people. Old internet anarchy was chaotic fun.
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.
I’m lost, here. Do you not think fighting toxicity and hate speech is a valid and important function of moderation that’s just as much or more for the sake of the people as it might be for advertisers?
I think the rise of hate speech on centralised platforms relies very heavily on their centralised moderation and curation via algorithms.
They have all known for a long time that their algorithms promote hate speech, but they know that curbing that behaviour negatively affects their revenue, so they don’t do it. They chase the fast buck, and they appease advertisers who have a naturally conservative bent, and that means rage bait and conventional values.
That’s quite apart from when platform owners explicitly support that hate speech and actively suppress left leaning voices.
I think what we have on decentralised systems where we curate/moderate for ourselves works well because most of that open hate speech is siloed, which I think is the best thing you can do with it.
I think that it’s just words & images on a screen that we could easily ignore like people did before, and people are indulging a grandiose conceit by thinking that moderation is that important or serves any greater cause than the interests of moderators. On social media that seems to be to serve the consumers, by which I mean the advertisers & commercial interests who pay for the attention of users. While the old internet approach of ignoring, gawking at the freakshow, or ridiculing/flaming toxic & hateful shit worked fine then resulting in many people disengaging, ragequitting, or going outside to do something better, that’s not great for advertisers protecting their brand & wanting to keep people pliant & unchallenged as they stay engaged in their uncritical filter bubbles & echo chambers.
With old internet, safety wasn’t an internet nanny, thought police shit, and “stop burning my virgin eyes & ears”. It was an anonymous handle, not revealing personally identifying information (a/s/l?), not falling for scams & giving out payment information (unless you’re into that kinky shit). Glad to see newer social media returning to some of that.
Toxicity doesn’t “work fine,” it’s contagious and destructive. For projects, it slows progress. For communities in general, it reinforces bad behavior and pushes out newcomers, leading to more negative spaces, isolation, and stagnation, just off the top of my head. These were issues in older communities just as they are in modern ones.
I don’t see why we should abandon moderation for your benefit, at the expense of people who care.
Your example of toxicity is linux maintainers resisting a newer programming language, not wanting to maintain additional bindings, and being stubborn about it? People decide whether to work & agree with each other, so what’s your definition of toxicity here? How’s moderation supposed to solve that: force people to agree & work together unwillingly? Seems rather authoritarian. People should only put words & images on a screen that someone approves? More authoritarian. And look at those imaginary problems we can solve!
This goes back to the grandiose conceit I wrote about earlier: some people can’t get over themselves, take these words & images on a screen a bit too seriously, and feel they know better than others the right words & images to put on a screen, because of course they do. The rest of us know it’s just a bunch of self-important crap that doesn’t matter unless we make it matter, and we can ignore it or put our own words & images on a screen or go outside.
You streamed together a sequence of misunderstandings, fallacies and self-victimization into an incoherent pile of garbage that fails at actually responding to anything. Got it, got it, you’re god’s bravest warrior, resisting the authoritarianism of people who think others shouldn’t be forced to tolerate your immaturity whenever you act like a cunt. I’ll stop giving you attention now, so sorry.
Victimization is all on those like you threatened by naughty words & images who claim we need some great moderator hero to defend us against their toxicity, which apparently includes work-related disagreements.
And they’ll be objective about it, or is anything someone disagrees with instance of immaturity & someone acting like a cunt? Do we need the noble internet police to swoop in and protect us against your words & images? They’re here, yet somehow the world isn’t crumbling.
didn’t read, easy block, shoulda done this sooner
Well done: thanks for ignoring & confirming my point. 😄
I wholeheartedly agree, the only censorship should be in the individuals hands and only affects them. Aka blocking other users or content from being displayed on your own account. My moral compass does not need to be everyone’s moral compass.
Lemmy has also taken over advertiser focused moderation patterns. A great example is NSFW. What is NSFW exactly? Not safe for work? Why is only that relevant?
NSFW is just used to mark advertiser unfriendly content. Why else group nakedness, violence, sexual content, and death in the same category?
It’s way too vague to be useful, you have no idea if you’re going to see a nipple or a murder.
Content warnings like on Mastodon are better, but don’t provide a way to reliably filter out categories. I personally think it would be way better to have specific nested tags for certain types of material.
Are you new to the internet? NSFW literally means what it says: it’s content that would not be safe for you to be viewing at work.
Advertising has nothing to do with it, which is why you still get ads on NSFW boards on 4chan; they’re just NSFW ads.
If you work from home it becomes NSFH.
Can anyone explain Bluesky vs Mastodon as Twitter alternatives, asking as someone who never really used Twitter much anyway?
On the surface, both of them look very similar in format. They also both advertise themselves as decentralized and different from traditional social media, arguing that they won’t face the same problems old social media did.
Mastodon uses ActivityPub, which is the widely used standard that most other fediverse platforms use. Mastodon is properly decentralized, where all the servers can interact and operate independently.
BlueSky made their own protocol that they control, citing that ActivityPub wasn’t enough for what they wanted to do, and in some ways that’s true. However with their structure, a central relay is needed in order for different instances to interact and so people argue that it isn’t truly decentralized. Right now BlueSky is either the only instance, or basically the only instance. They’ve mentioned that they could transfer control of the relay to some other organization, but past that I don’t think they’ve taken any steps towards that.
BlueSky is also a VC backed company while Mastodon is now under a nonprofit. BlueSky has its roots in crypto tech. There is more technical discussion on if it’s even possible to have a decentralized BlueSky and if it’s all just talk while they gather users.
My personal opinion is that I really hope bluesky does what they’re promising, but I’m not expecting them to be any different than Twitter once they get a critical mass of users and the investors demand profits / infinite growth.
.
from what i understand, a decentralized bluesky is nothing for an enduser at all.
TL;DR: the cost for an enduser to run a bluesky instance will soon be prohibitive because of the amount of storage needed owed to its shared heap architecture. but what it does is to provide a “credible exit” - if users lose trust or the company shutters, there’s nothing in the way of another organisation picking up the mantle and continue from there on.
Bluesky is what happens when someone with a corporate mindset wants to make something new and good. Mastodon happens when hobbyists get together and make something. Ive heard BlueSky has a board of people in charge to make sure it doesn’t end up like twitter. Exactly what one would expect a company to do. Make sure something doesnt go wrong? Put a few people in charge. Mastodon just has the whole community. I may be wrong here as I dont use either. Right now Im just wondering what will happen when BlueSkys provider comes knocking with the hosting bill. As mass social media migrations are rare, its just a shame people are leaving twitter for another big tech site instead of something more community grown.
For me the advantage of Bluesky is that I can own my identity. I can reserve myusername@mydomain.tld and use that, without having to run my own instance.
With Mastodon I’d have to put up a full-ass server instance and worry about federation etc just to have my “own” identity instead of myusername@mastodon.social or something
Sounds like bullshit for useful idiots that don’t know what they’re talking about.
Bluesky is corporate, Mastodon is closer to Lemmy in ownership.
There’s a viral marketing campaign going on right now to herd the twitter sheep to the next rich-person’s platform. That’s why we keep seeing useful idiots say “bluesky” instead of “Mastodon.”
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.
Yeah, infighting in the resistance is a waste of time.
💙
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/d75529ae-30e2-4ed5-91b4-35de1990c545.jpeg">
My recent experience bluesky social was right wing. I got marked as spam immediately for commenting left wing, polite normal stuff, no arguments or anything controversial. My appeals were ignored for weeks so I left.
Interesting info, thank you. It isn’t FOSS so I don’t plan on actively using it but I try to keep my finger on what’s up. I don’t miss Reddit and wish I didn’t need a FB for my job. My account is almost a ghost though and I don’t have it on my phone. I’m sure they still have way too much data on me though.
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.
It’s what the DNC wants. They want to only be seen as the “lesser evil” to people like trump.
They genuinely have no interest in helping the working class, because they’re not a part of it.
Socialized healthcare, removing money from politics, and taxing the rich is not “the lesser evil” it’s fucking good. It’s blatantly a force of great good that we keep snubbing and blaming for no reason at all.
What we should be doing is giving them majorities and supermajorities and praising them for the great work they do.
They don’t care about doing any of that, though. They only make promises to get elected and reneg on everything once in office.
Did any of that happen while Biden was in office? Didn’t think so. It’s because he’s a stooge propped up by the ruling class to make people like you think he has your interests at hand. He doesn’t. Establishment democrats do not want to raise taxes on the wealthy. That’s a progressive agenda.
Those are literally laws they have written, voted on, and in some cases actually passed before.
When?
In 1995 until 2002 they attempted to ban large campaign contributions and SUCCEEDED until it was struck down in 2010 by a conservative split SCOTUS decision 5-4 in Citizens United
In 2013 they used the caucusing IND supermajority to vote for public option healthcare coverage and it lost by 1 vote (the IND betrayed us) so instead we got Medicaid Expansion which combined with Childrens Health Insurance Program payed for the medical costs of 79 Million Americans currently.
The previous Tax Plan was written and passed by the GOP after 2016 elections, and it expires THIS YEAR meaning the GOP get to write the next tax plan, too. Can you guess what Kamala Harris’ tax plan was? It was to lower taxes for earners below 400k, tax unrealized gains for the rich, raise taxes for the wealthy in general.
If democrats really wanted to reduce the disparity in wealth, why would they avoid nominating Bernie twice?
I’ve seen this one before! The only part that “gets through” are the tax cuts for those making >$100k per year!
This is why establishment democrats don’t want people like Bernie. They’re part of the problem and want to keep profiting off of it.
So there is this thing called a Primary Election which Bernie lost by a huge amount of votes every time. Luckily Bernie agreed with me on this and desperately asked us to vote for the candidate who won.
Fun fact, Bernie isn’t even in the DNC and they still let him on their tickets to begin with.
Really hoping legislators in Sweden don’t force Signal to pull its services from the country. 🫣
What legislation would do that? Would they want access to your messages or something?
They want to make crime fighting more accessible to the police… 💀
Signal has been questionable for years. The way it’s been pushed hardly, and how Moxie is emeritus, while much more questionable people are in control, doesn’t fill one with confidence, and does ring some alarm bells. The relative proximity to some in the US establishment should be enough to do that. And the way some have been designating anyone who questions Signal as “Russian Propaganda” and immediately deflecting about how Telegram is bad, is even more curious.
Frankly, I would trust something like Wire more than Signal. And there are other options too.
Ideally, something with good security/privacy and is fully P2P would become popular. But those apps/networks never make it mainstream, which is unfortunate.
louder for the people in the back.
There is a lot in here that I don’t understand.
Honestly, there was nothing at all in there that I understood, due to how vague it all was. I would appreciate it if you or someone could fill me in here, because it’s important to know who’s driving this thing, and if the platform can be trusted. I just want to not go by some vague rumors before I make up my mind.
Bluesky will be the next Twitter. Just give it some time
Exactly! All a person has to do is to look around - the right buys up all popular media platforms and converts them to propaganda outlets.
businessinsider.com/x-competitor-bluesky-valuatio…
Why bluesky instead of mastodon? It’s like saying lemmy.world is going to replace reddit instead of the Lemmy platform.
Are you just commenting how the people who use something like twitter are eager to be herded like sheep into the next walled garden?
Are you part of the bluesky viral marketing campaign to make it artificially seem like it’s “already won”?
I’m wondering this too People are hyped about bluesky but it is the same corpo bullshit that Twitter is. I mean it is literally by the same dude. Why fold?,
Didnt Dorsey already walk from it and gave the reason that it is headed the same way twitter is. Bluesky is being pushed by capitalists because it is a for profit company just like twitter and facebook.
Bizarre that you and that other guy thought “will become the next Twitter” was some sort of praise. It’s not.
I think it’s more bizarre that you think “same corpo bullshit that Twitter is” is some kind of praise.
If you don’t agree with the person above you, maybe don’t start your comment with
Accusing people of being shills for commenting that bluesky is going to become (shitty) like twitter is out of pocket.
There is another interpretation. Calm down.
Err… what?
Care to explain what that ‘other interpretation’ is?
You are taking “replace Twitter” as an endorsement, when in reality it was intended as a condemnation.
When I said bluesky will be the next Twitter did I said Twitter is a good place. Twitter is now bullshit.
Because there is only so much oxygen in the room, and corporate ventures like Bluesky seem to come into really exciting DIY community spaces that are creating amazing things and pull the oxygen out of the room while never quite delivering on what they are promising… or seeming to promise… and in the mean time the projects that originally created the innovative energy in the space are lost in the noise.
I mean… see basically the entire early history of the commercialization of personal computers for endless repetitions of this pattern.
Remember we are not the customers of corporate social media companies, we are the raw husks they extract value from through surveillance capitalism and ads/paid content.
I signed up today. I never liked Twitter but I will give it a try. Steam (PC gaming platform) is a member so that’s a plus for me.
piratewires.com/…/interview-with-jack-dorsey-mike…
thats how its creator feels too.
And here’s how and why it will be enshitified:
pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/
RemindMe! 10 years
mastodon is already the next twitter, bluesky is just a direct copy of it with nothing keeping it from going the same way. mastodon is open source (can't be corpoed), federated (can talk to other platforms/instances so being on a small one doesn't hurt anything), and most importantly, uses a protocol that doesn't make self-hosting impossible due to storage requirements.
And is comprised entirely of no one I care to follow, awesome.
You don’t just trade 1 powerful ceo for another when you get the chance to leave. Ridiculous.
Here’s the same video on PeerTube
tilvids.com/w/rq6WfwnQTiHfpoWhURLNBS
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/3ec89302-4d66-4d79-b0a9-90ce304ff350.gif">
We should have a bot link federated alts for links… 🤔
There is a Firefox extension that does automatically (although it seems to be a bit unreliable). Maybe someone can extract that part into a library and make a not with it.
That works for desktop but not the voyager app 🫤
Not a big surprise it’s only the alternatives to twitter and instagram.
CIA. A rehash of the crypto ag strategy
What do you mean?
Good boi
i’m on a finnish instance but i’m on ihio
also as far as my cred i am considered epic by some weird guys.
.