Guys, when you talk about the Fediverse to friends, family, or colleagues, how do you explain it?
Do you call it a “decentralized social network,” an “alternative to big tech,” or “a collection of open-source networks”? And how do you convince someone to create an account on Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, etc., without them getting scared by technical terms like instance, federated, or peer-to-peer?
I’m asking because my so-called friends don’t believe me and even call me crazy when I talk about this “nonsense.”
The future is open source, decentralized, and federated!
I say it doesn’t sell all your data to random companies all over the place.
The whole thing with federating is irrelevant to most users.
I tell them it’s a social media built in a way that makes it impossible for any company to take over it in order to make profit. And then I show them to some instance I’ve hand-picked for them, without really telling them there are other instances as well. It’s not something they should worry about at that point. I can explain it later on, anyway.
The whole thing with federating is irrelevant to most users.
I tell them it’s a social media built in a way that makes it impossible for any company to take over it in order to make profit. And then I show them to some instance I’ve hand-picked for them, without really telling them there are other instances as well. It’s not something they should worry about at that point. I can explain it later on, anyway. interesting!
I don’t. It’s bad enough that people spend too much time on social media. Why the fuck would i introduce another one?
I’m practically only here because rif died. Its not because it’s enjoyable. I open the app to maybe see one good post among the thousands and thousands of “same”-posts.
I don’t. It’s bad enough that people spend too much time on social media. Why the fuck would i introduce another one?
I’m practically only here because rif died. Its not because it’s enjoyable. I open the app to maybe see one good post among the thousands and thousands of “same”-posts.
You made me think.
I don’t. I say oh yeah I read that on Lemmy. They don’t ask, I don’t offer.
If for some reason they say what is Lemmy? I say just a community version of Reddit not run by companies.
They never ask further, so I don’t need to start explaining parallels to email.
A free and open source social media platform supported only by the users and not by spying on its users.
Yeah but then there’s still no buy in from friends and family. They are most likely going to retort “Well none of my friends use it”. We could have open source social media in 2020s but people don’t want to use something they don’t know. Meta is comfortable for them and they are OK with being tracked and monitored by Meta intelligence, its stupid that they rather live like that but only they can change their minds
The reality is it will take some disruptive force to alter the status quo. Maybe the government splitting up tech giants, maybe some public backlash to current events or maybe we will be invaded by aliens. Whatever it is, I will be waiting here on the Fediverse to welcome any and all who wish to join. Now having glimpsed a world free of invasive spying and constant manipulation to buy more stuff, I will never go back.
I don’t bother explaining it unless asked. I just share content with them. They can figure it out if they’re interested.
If I am asked, then it’s “a decentralized platform similar to…” whatever. Most folks are “don’t know, don’t care” when it comes to anything technical.
Here’s a better link from mastodon. It gives you a preview and has no ads.
“I’m trying to cut down on social media.”
Great, mastodon isn’t optimised for engagement, it’s just stuff you follow in chronological order.
Just wait until they get banned from reddit, get them to sign up and show them the Boost client (that used to work on reddit) and away they’ll go. That’s how i did it :-)
I’ll be honest, I still don’t understand how Twitter-style social media works. If people can figure that crap out and it became one of the most popular forms of social media, they most absolutely can figure out the fediverse.
Open source Reddit alternative
I link them to a post i think they’ll like. Then if they ask i say “its like email the servers send around the posts and comments around to each other, but some are blocked from each other to keep out known bad actors (kind of like known spam email servers)”
When people start talking about why they deleted instagram etc because of all the ads and time wasting, I tell them I’m using / posting on Pixelfed etc because it’s community owned, no ads, no brainwashing. That gets them interested but not enough to go and figure out what an instance is.
Lemmy is to Reddit what Methadone is to Heroin
The amount of gatekeeping I’m seeing here is insane
What do you mean?
I don’t introduce people to the fediverse
The fediverse introduces people to you
HELLO FRIEND
Correct answer, my fight for privacy is weird enough for the average. Introducing the fediverse would make it worse.
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