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Fediverse @lemmy.world
rosahaj @lemmy.blahaj.zone

A Request to the Fediverse Community

With the recent happenings in the United States, the dangers of the privately owned Internet is more apparent than ever, and frankly, it's scary. And so I'd like to make a simple request to anyone who is reading this; Please use the Fediverse, just a little more.

I personally hate it when I'm stuck having to visit say, YouTube or Reddit to get information, or to entertain myself in quiet moments, and if you're reading this, the likely chance is you're the same.

All I want to ask of you is to just comment a few more times, press send on that post that you felt wasn't of enough substance to be worth anyone's time. We have such a small community compared to everywhere else, but what we do have in common is that, in the grand scheme of things, we are the early adopters. And if we take that to heart and make this space a little bigger, maybe it will be just big enough we won't have to visit walled gardens so often.

Thank you :)

255 comments

  • Recently I've been thinking about what the internet was like in the 90s. Back when there was no social media. Maybe we should all return to forums and BBSs.

    • This and the level of free speech that came with it is really needed right now. I don't mean free speech in a go tell someone you disagree with to fuck their aunt type of way. I mean having real deep hard conversations about organizing and enabling movements. It feels like the Internet is scared of that because of monetization and content policies that have chopped the balls off of any form of organization or resistance. Like there's so much shit I wish I could say but some mod policy kills it with a pinned post at the top of the comment section before I can even begin typing out my thoughts.

  • The first step is to overcome the dependence of the common forum places, being able to renounce to them, remove your profile and learn to enjoy your life without them… only then you can happily drift into a less crowded and active community for ocasional wonders and quality instead of the saturation of engagement that “that” centralised social media offers, the peer pressure to be part of the main stream…

    • you're right, but these forums also crowdsource information which can be sorely needed, such as debugging help and problem resolution. unless we provide an alternate hub for this, we aren't likely to see the dominance of these common forums cease.

      • I see, my tip was thinking in meta/tiktok-like socials rather than reddit/stackoverflow-like. But I feel that it is not too much different. Probably the error was pouring so much knowledge in such “volatile” places (in the sense of user/community not really controlling it) in the first place, but aren’t human interactions already like that? Accept them as conversations lost in time, something always survive and returns, and new things always born. A pity, sure, but a part of life. In any case, it is quite unlikely to reach in a new place in barely a few years the same quantity of information than more than a decade of knowledge in old forums, yet I feel that pian piano people contributes to the shift… in the end we are humans which enjoy of social exchanges :D

  • Yeah, I'm trying to change Reddit by Lemmy, and I'm moving out of Instagram, since I made it just to connect with friends (so I still have to ask some friends for contact info outside Reddit and Instagram so I can quit for good)

  • Or just any FOSS & Decentralized platforms in general

    Actually this Odysee post explains what I want to say about stregthening Alternative platforms

    • The thing with Odysee is that I see A LOT of right-wing and religious nuts in my feed, even before login in, and in comment sections , and that alone basically drived me out

  • 2025 year of the fediverse???

    Jokes aside, i completely agree. Meta and Xitter completely shot themselves in the foot (lol) and pixelfed is gaining mainstream attention, and the new year just started!

    I predict we'll gain a massive influx of new users next year, due to the kindness of Zucc and Muskrat 😊

    • And who says they've never done anything good?

      But yeah, let's ride that momentum all the way into the year of the fediverse!

  • Small instance owner here. All are welcome. We have one really busy community here, and a few others that are just getting going that you might find interesting. You like World of Warships? The Last of Us? St. Louis Battlehawks? Abandoned Buildings?

    You'll notice some of these communities are a ghost town. Images are broken and there's a rat eating pizza. So step up. Avoid the large, overwhelmed, weirdly-political instances and give us little guys a chance.

    I'll begin by introducing myself. Hi! I am oleorun, named after the recently deceased Bob Uecker's Baseball Hall of Fame speech. My instance, https://real.lemmy.fan/, is known for the !weirdnews@real.lemmy.fan community, but we have more to offer. !aviation@real.lemmy.fan , a college radio station, !wsup@real.lemmy.fan , and more communities waiting to be joined, and built, and best of all there's no ads, no donation requests, just pure love of a federated instance that thrives on niceness.

    I'd be real happy for you to join us.

    oleorun@real.lemmy.fan

    Edit: Typos

    • I cannot express how much respect I hold for instance owners, you're doing something great! Maybe one day I'll follow in your footsteps (when I step up from small game servers :P). Say, would those dead communities qualify for a post in c/abandonedarchitecture?

  • Y’know what, here I am! This is such a genuine request.

    Thank you, friend! This post may very well be the tipping point for many Lemmings/Fediversers, myself included.

    • And I'm so glad to see you here! I sure hope you're right, but the fact that I'm responding to you alone shows just how right you are!

  • I'm a fediverse supporter (obviously, that's why I'm here), however what you're looking for requires a critical mass of users that the fediverse (at least the Lemmy side of it) will never achieve as long as two very critical problems persist:

    1. sign up is confusing. People are used to clicking "create an account," inputting a user name, password, and maybe an email, and then BAM they're a user. I realize the whole instance thing is the entire point, but no one wants nor expects to have to do significant research and make a decision about how they want to interact with a social media site before they've even started using it.
    2. the site (or at least lemmy.world) is sooo slooow. Basic functions like loading images take me back to the dial-up era of "click the image then do something else while it loads," which is downright ridiculous in the 2020s. Again I've stuck with it because I want to support the fediverse, but 99% of users won't.

    And no, these aren't "features not bugs" unless you want to keep the site small and homogenous.

    • Blaze has put in a ton of work simplifying the former, and while the latter isn't strictly only related to Lemmy.world, many other servers are much faster.

      e.g. click on https://discuss.online/, see how it shows All (rather than Local) by default (that's an issue with some), and Active. Click posts, see how fast images load, read the pinned posts and imagine how quickly the admin responds.

      THEN if someone likes it, join. Many Redditors are in the USA, where discuss.online is also, so it's a great match.

      There are other instances, but showcasing that one is a great way to help guide people to what Lemmy is all about.

    • possibly the biggest eye opener has been seeing how much the average person knows about computers, it's seriously hard to comprehend that divide (obligatory xkcd; https://xkcd.com/2501/), I think the best we can do is build a community, and give the loved ones in our lives an onboarding experience where we can. learning anything new is intimidating, but through exposure, it can be done, we've just gotta make it worth it.

    • I honestly don't understand point 1. no matter how much people say it.

      Maybe I'm naive because it wasn't confusing to me personally, but it is only one extra step to create an account. When people explain the Fediverse to new people they compare it to e-mail anyway, which basically has the exact same sign-up structure. The only difference to me is the way it is advertised. Nobody in general says "you need to join e-mail", it's usually "join GMail" or "join Yahoo". I don't know how it would be solved without detracting from the "choose the instance that is right for you" experience though, since the instances with the most support and funding will obviously hold the most influence (as we currently see with lemmy.world and lemmy.ml, not to mention pixelfed.social).

      IDK maybe I'm wrong, lmk, but I don't think choosing an instance is all the friction it's said to be.

      The big instances are definitely slower though.

    • but no one wants nor expects to have to do significant research and make a decision about how they want to interact with a social media site before they've even started using it.

      Then just directly recommend specific, general purpose instances to people.

    • sign up is confusing.

      "Lemmy has 42k monthly active users

      Feel free if you have any questions"

      Further discussion on https://lemmy.world/post/24577309

    • Try another server. I use r.nf and it's very fast. Decentralisation is pointless if everyone flocks to the same server.

      If people want freedom and independence, they're going to have to a little work for it, because those things never come for free. And yes, that is a feature, not a bug. That "I should not ever have to engage my grey matter" mentality is the whole cause of the corporate fascist mess in the first place.

    • I agree with you on 1. I hope it never fucking changes. The worst thing that could happen is we get the critical mass of dipshits that turns every online service into a fucking shit tornado.

  • I am SO thankful that there are so many people out there working on projects such as this! I gained lots of momentum in the past weeks protecting my privacy and taking digital matters back in my own hands, i wouldn't have come so far if it wheren't for all the other people who have been doing this for years! Thanks everyone :)

    • You said it! I remember years back looking for reddit alternatives and the only things around were stuff like raddle.me. Seeing lemmy and the fediverse develop like this? It's a dream come true!

  • I am trying to. I just found about lemmy today.

    Can someone recommend me some other stuff?

    • Recommend Lemmy communities, or other Fediverse alternatives (like Mastodon as a replacement for Twitter, the same way Lemmy replaces Reddit)?

    • There's Mastodon for your microblogging. There's Pixelfed for posting pictures kind of like Instagram. Loops for videos like TikTok. There's many others as well, but this should be a good start.

    • Despite my seniority around these parts (first started an interest in lemmy around 2022) I'm not too tied into the community around here. I'd reccomend just subscribing to some interesting large communities, communities around your interests and whatever community would be best for whatever pops into your mind! If you'd like, feel free to message me and we can throw around ideas of what could be right for you!

255 comments