It’s rough right now politically in the US. A lot of people around me seem like they’re ready to give up hope. It makes me incredibly angry seeing Zuck up there with all the other billionaires, and Elon is a parasite that has infected the government.
I often find myself wondering how I can make a difference. How can we regain control of our world?
Idk if I’m being dramatic, but the Fediverse really seems like it could be our response to these fuckers controlling the narrative on social media. It could be more than just an interesting decentralized social media platform. I really think this could be a key step in reclaiming our democracy.
Am I being dramatic lol? Do you all feel the same way? I was kinda getting emotional even. Like we could bring real change. That gives me hope, which is something we are desperately lacking right now.
It’s not just Lemmy. It makes me happy to see all the Fediverse platforms (specifically activity pub based) blowing up.
Friendly reminder if you have the financial means, donate to your instance, donate to the Lemmy devs, donate to Pixelfed or any other social media app fighting big social media. And better than a one-time donation, set up a monthly contribution even if it’s just $2/month. It really helps open-source developers when they have a steady income.
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i like it here and have no desire to switch over to big tech or any algorithm.
No.
Yeah, there’s nothing to be hopeful for. The little blips of okayness won’t change that.
Hope in what sense? Hope that it’s generally possible to connect online without corporate social media? Sure …
Hope that it’ll become a replacement social media at a large scale? Probably not … I think the way push-federation is implemented makes it inconvenient and hard to grasp, and generally people seem to prefer centralized platforms for the sheer convenience of use, which is hard to beat.
So I guess it’ll remain stable in it’s own little niche … which isn’t bad I suppose …
I’m not in the US (thinking of you guys everyday), but when I found myself feeling depressed by the direction of big tech, I realized that open-source and the Fediverse was the healthy and exciting way forwards. It was the one thing that felt like I remember the internet feeling like in the late 90s. I think you are spot on. It is the only way that democracy can survive in tech.
Yes. But I’m worried about Big Tech hijacking ActuvityPub and that they enforce the end of net neutrality. EU regulations and investments is our only hope right now.
IMHO there’s still hope in p2p mesh networking. It can’t support high-bandwidth applications, but all the absolutely critical correspondence would work.
Lemmy, the Fediverse, and open source in general too. Every time bullshit happens I find myself more and more replacing closed systems with community-developed and community-run systems. It’s not only the giving back/contributing/being part, and the openness, it’s also that this cannot be taken away so easily. Taken by buying the company, a software update, agreement change or the fact that someday you may not be able to pay your monthly fee and loose access to all your stuff.
Frankly, it’s stressing me out. The non-stop barrage of Trump, Musk and other bullshit is just a bit too much on here. I get how the platform generally is very left leaning, but it really does feel like the sky is falling every five minutes, you know?
@FinishingDutch@lemmy.world
@moseschrute@lemmy.world sometimes it takes letting it play out for people to remember the leason that history could have thaught them. Do your best now to prepare for some tough times. If you own your home outright, get that basement ready for a renter. If you’ve already leveraged 80% of your home, get out from under that NOW and look for a basement to rent.
Read some Steinbeck. Watch Idocracy. Strike up a conversation with the oldest people you cross paths with about what they remember their parents telling them about the great depression. It’s going to suck, but when someone can convince this many Americans to vote against their own interests their is a more fundamental problem.
I personally take a little joy from the interveiws with people laid off who didn’t realize the company they worked for was producing products for federally subsidized clean energy initiatives.
Honestly, it’s just a matter of time before they make more Luigis snap. Hopefully they’ll be an organized way to oust them all before the guillotines and the dining sets start coming out.
Hope ? Maybe, maybe not
It’s nice, but it doesn’t really give me hope. Lemmy is good because it’s not mainstream. Once it got relevant, it would turn into today’s reddit. And if it, by chance, evolved into relevant opposition, I believe it would be easy for billionaires to destroy, despite the decenzralized character. It could also be used for curbing the opposition by gathering information about it. There’s no way to hide from people with enough money.
What’s wrong with being the next Reddit
In my opinion reddit was bad because of the closing of the source, and centralization and administration by a single corporation interested in profits, which results in the cesspool we know reddit as today. it wasn’t bad because of the format that lemmy replicates as a link aggregator, so I agree with you on this point.
No, it’s continued relative unpopularity in the face of universal hated-but-contined-use of the mainstream networks continues to be depressing.
Although the onboarding process for most of the major fediverse platforms is a bit scary for normies.
Lemmy is very harsh to most people. People that think liberal means the Democrats.
It’s not just Lemmy. I was thinking more like Mastodon. Tbh I haven’t tried frendica, but I haven’t heard of anyone actually using it.
At least pixelfed defaults you to the main instance so you don’t have to think about it if you don’t want to. Although the official android app hasn’t worked for me in ages.
It gives me hope yeah, alot of my family and coworkers are extremely conservative and it’s given me hope that they’re not the default for cis people. I’ve since gotten away from alot of them and met irl friends who’re more accepting but the presence of people online who didn’t begrudgingly tolerate me before then has given me hope and the courage I would need to advocate for myself and not accept the bare minimum
It does give me hope, but I also worry it may be a double edged sword and opening pandora’s box. There are way too many ideologies here that aren’t democracy. Given how easy the public was brain washed by Trump, I fear this may be an avenue to expose those people to things that probably shouldn’t even be crossing their minds.
the Fediverse really seems like it could be our response to these fuckers controlling the narrative on social media. It could be more than just an interesting decentralized social media platform. I really think this could be a key step in reclaiming our democracy.
Agreed, and I would add that finding ways to get nonprofit news organizations (e.g. ProPublica) and public media (e.g. NPR, PBS, etc.) to host and administer their own instances and to start directing their readers/listeners to those services would be a great way to advance this goal
It gives me confidence. I know that now that I host my own lemmy, I cannot be randomly banned because I triggered some automatic spam filter with my scripts (happened in reddit), or banned because I talked back to the wrong mod. I know that our internationally distributed nature makes it harder to control top-down, so takeovers like Musk-Xitter are not possible. We can still be affected by disinfo campaigns and troll farms, and we unfortunately have weakened defenses against that, but I’m confident that a lot of smart admins and tooling providers will bunch together to figure out the countermeasures that will work.
oh snap, db0 the person! Love your instance.
Yeah, being banned because a mod didn’t like you was the worst thing on Reddit. Especially if they modded multiple subs and banned you from a subreddit you never even came close to breaking the rules on. Some Reddit mods were just assholes.
How expensive is it to host your own instance? Assuming you aren’t doing it in house.
About 5-20 eur/month should be enough for most instance admins, depending on their provider.
Which do you use?
My setup is quite complex and I have 1000+ MAU so we’re not a small instance anymore. That said we use hetzner, ovh, and mailgun. Our hosting hosts are more than 100 per month but I could probably be running a bit cheaper if I wanted, but this way we have easy growing space.
That’s much more expensive than I would imagine! Hope you are fully funded. You’re the best instance.
I’m curious about this too
