It’s brief, around 25:15
https://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 :)
Good boi
Here’s the same video on PeerTube
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 🫤
Bluesky will be the next Twitter. Just give it some time
https://www.piratewires.com/p/interview-with-jack-dorsey-mike-solana
thats how its creator feels too.
And here’s how and why it will be enshitified:
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.
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.
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.
John Oliver fans are the perfect candidates to join the fediverse, hopefully some of them find their way to Lemmy.
Too late - we are already here!:-P
This was literally the photo that finally got me banned from Reddit years ago.
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.
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.
If your goal is truly to benefit the public, why wouldn’t you start a non-profit?
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.
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.
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.
“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.
Chances are it’s really just that, a start. See OpenAI.
If I was losing money and wanted to mantain control over the public id become a public benefit corp too
So twitter didn’t make money anyways, this is a better way for them to hold power
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.
This; I’m so sick of hearing it pop up when people mention alternatives.
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.
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.
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.
They haven’t gone through the churn of corporate emshittification enough yet I’d have to guess.
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.
Exactly, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Someone using BlueSky over Twitter is a good thing.
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 :)
John Oliver being uploaded to YouTube is awesome! I should comment that Lemmy is a great Reddit alternative
I agree, but I also think we should remember a loss for musk is a win for society
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.
Do you really think Lemmy could handle the amount of people that Reddit has?
yup. no question. Not one instance mind you, but Reddit is also a giant cluster. (and clusterfuck)
As far as I know the existing instances are usually running on capacity and always in need of donations,
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 Lemmy would benefit of some way to get people to pay, such as purchasing the ability to give people awards etc.
Maybe we make some premium pay servers with baller architecture, killer response time, user capacity limits and high speed storage?
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.
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.
But I strongly believe that depending on donations is a very tough place to be
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mom we are on the TV!
we
technically we are federated, so kind of?
federated, kind of
Really hoping legislators in Sweden don’t force Signal to pull its services from the country. 🫣
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.
There is a lot in here that I don’t understand.
- What’s wrong with Moxie? You mean it’s weird he’s an emeritus and not part of the board?
- What’s “much more questionable” about the other people? From the descriptions on that page they all seem like standup people.
- Could you explain the “relative proximity to some in the US establishment” bit? That was too vague for me to grasp.
- “some have been designating anyone who questions Signal as ‘Russian Propaganda’ and immediately deflecting about how Telegram is bad, is even more curious.” — Who has done this, you mean? And why exactly is it “curious”?
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.
louder for the people in the back.
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… 💀
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
I’m so looking forward to that!
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 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
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.
How is Brave right wing? Because of cryptocurrencies?
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.
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 https://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.
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.
You mean Last Week Tonight? The Late Show is Colbert.
I do 🥺
Good question. Would love that!
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You don’t just trade 1 powerful ceo for another when you get the chance to leave. Ridiculous.
This is fantastic to see.
One of the few decent TV hosts. His reporting on Palestine breaks with the anti-Palestinian censorship that dominates US media.
someone tell that n00b that Bluesky is not an alternative
It is to twitter.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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Bluesky is corporate, Mastodon is closer to Lemmy in ownership.
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
My step dad actually got my family on signal YEARS ago and I will never be more thankful.
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)
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
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
Maybe you want to communicate through an encrypted service?
