I do a presentation of the Fediverse to my college students and will soon be giving short workshops to organization as well. I realize that a viable, decentralized altenative to Facebook is IMO the biggest missing piece of the puzzle. We need something that offers some kind of central platform for networking, events, groups, etc. For work related stuff I present Nexcloud. Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed and Loops are getting really interesting and working alternative to their counterparts. I believe if we could get a massive movement of people to adopt an FOSS alternative to Facebook, everything else would easily follow. What do you people think, what would you recommend? I haven’t tried Friendica yet.
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friendica
Alternatives do exist; the real thing that’s been missing is the user base. Barely anyone is on it.
As an example: we have 9.1 million people in Quebec, Canada. How many are on Friendica?
Not even a hundred.
USERS are what’s missing.
Facebook is like Myspace: it’s has-been. If I was a developers interested in contributing to the Fediverse, that’s the last social media I’d choose to spend my time reimplementing.
People just like what they know. You should spend all your free time making something just like the thing they know. So that they won’t use it because they don’t know it. It’s a catch 22.
No matter what your opinion on fb is, each time I do my presentation, it’s the main thing people ask me for. To my suprise, even my students in their young 20s are using it a lot, and it’s the main platform for people over 40. Billion of people uses it everyday so I wouldn’t call it has-been. If we could bring even a small percentage of these people to the fedi, it would destabilise the economic model social media is based on. I’m not saying I like fb, I actually never have, but we can’t pretend people are over with it.
I’m pretty much forced to use Facebook and Messenger because of school. Some teachers will grade you only if you upload your work and tag them on Facebook, sometimes you have to repost or like videos because your project is a video and there’s a group competition based on those metrics. Messenger is the default mode of communication between students and teachers, as well as a way to contact people for your graded surveys.
Report those fuckers to the school board and files complaints.
People need to protest social media as part of education and fuck schools that vendor lock in their students to M$ bullshit as well.
It is not feasible unfortunately, and if I were to put that as a complaint, I would most likely be called unhinged, out-of-touch, or trying to discard a perfectly usable system. We can only raise questions and influence people as of now. Besides, the reason why Messenger is popular is because of the freebasics service which allows people to use Messenger for free.
lol fuck that apathetic attitude.
We all need to be sand in their oligarch machines.
Schools need to teach that “FREE” does not mean free. Might be another good thing to bring up with the school board cause clearly that’s a lesson they didn’t learn.
