Max-P

Back in the days we’d get free hosting and slap phpBB on it. Run for kids by kids, no pesky adult rules!

Those were the days. No credit cards needed, no nothing, just free 50MB of Apache/MySQL/PHP4 hosting with no strings attached.

If the fediverse was a thing I’d probably have had my own instance starting age 14-15ish.

I was totally above 13 or had parental consent when I went to forums in the early 2000s. I totally wasn’t actually 9.

It’s wild to me this concept disappeared? It’s literally never been a good idea to reveal you’re a minor online. The laws are against you. Companies don’t want to deal with a curated minor experience, even less so in the current times. If they do, you get the crappier version of things.

The worst thing to happen to the Internet is when Facebook normalized using your real name and real info online.

Nope. The protocol is way too public for shadowbanning.

You can be banned by other instances than your home instance, when that happens no new post/comment from you will federate to that instance in particular but the others still sees it as normal.

For example, I could ban you on my instance, and I wouldn’t see anything from you ever again, but my instance would be the only instance to see that ban.

If you get banned from LW or lemmy.ml then a lot of people won’t see you so that could definitely feel like a shadow ban, but there’s nothing shadow about it you can see it in the mod log.

Yeah the best campaigns I’ve seen for the Fediverse were reactionary to something happening on big socials: Lemmy when the API fiasco happened, Mastodon when Elon bought Twitter, recently Pixelfed to replace Instagram, and Loops the last 2 weeks before TikTok was about to get banned.

People don’t change because it’s better, they change because they’re pissed off at their current platform.

Good luck with “exhaustive” because people have different unique reasons to come to the fediverse. It would be a very long list.

For the average user I’d approach it with points that affects everyone:

• We can’t have a Twitter-style take over
• We can’t have a Reddit API disaster
• It’s distributed so while parts of the fediverse come and go, you’ll never lose the platform as a whole.
• It’s distributed geographically so one hostile country can’t silence information from other countries like Facebook and Twitter are doing.
• No algorithms designed to keep you scrolling forever
• No ads or commercial content being pushed by the algorithm
• Loads of choices for instances and moderation style for everyone’s taste.
• Users get to choose how they want to browse and with which apps: you’re not stuck with the latest crappy redesign you hate. You’ll never be forced to have reels and stories in your feed if you don’t want that.
• Not controlled by big corporations like Meta and Google, but rather the community for the community.
• If you have sensitive communities you can own the servers to ensure it’s survival in situations where Facebook would immediately ban that page/group.
• No bullshit AI products shoved in your face like Grok or Reddit Answers.
• You as a user are in control of what you see and don’t see.
• No advertiser friendly content policies forcing you to use stupid words like “unalive”, “pewpew”, “corn” or algorithmic downprioritization because you swore.
• If you prefer to browse Instagram-like, you still get to see Twitter-like post, and you friends can see your photos from a Twitter-like interface. Or you can have a Twitter-like interface and interact with Reddit-like posts on Lemmy.

It’s harder to onboard and figure out by the common people but it would be the final platform switch. You may move instances over time but you will never be left looking for a new platform because the old one enshittified. You just move to an instance that hasn’t, done.

You probably want something like Aether instead of the fediverse: https://getaether.net/

It’s peer to peer, encrypted, anonymous, ephemeral and all that.