I’m here because it’s eventually going to be the better alternative.
FOSS by its nature, will keep on improving. And proprietary bloatware, by its nature, will only gonna get worse.
I would not agree with the general statement about FOSS. Some commercial products absolutely do edge out the free ones. And I am not sure it is only the limited funding, seeing the usability issues with Linux. I think Linus Tech Tips video series was a nice insight.
But for social platforms I do not even see a different way. FOSS is a must, especially with the inherent bias of algorithms. Commercial third party clients still could be beneficial.
How many of those commercial products are more than 1/2 FOSS though.
Really what we are talking about is last mile code really, yes that can cost money but I think its on the way, I remember when linux was unusable as a desktop.
I said it 20 years ago and I still believe it now, its not possible to monetize a social network to be both profitable and vibrant. Social networks are like public transit, at best you can hope to break even, maintaining the commons is just part of being in this world. We can’t sit around and expect others to do it for us.
I think Linux usability is very good. The problem is the vast majority of Linux distros aren’t great.
I switched to Fedora from windows a year or two ago, I’ll never look back.
Same but Zorin OS.
I’m about utility. Online social engagement is a need. People who can’t connect need a way to connect. This is a public utility, a social service. It needs to be streamlined, free, and as open as possible to anyone who wishes to participate.
It is a human right to connect. We shouldn’t hide it beind any paywall, ad, company, entity or outside will. People have a right to enter the room, speak and listen without being attacked by anything.
Normally I’d just ask you to go outside and touch grass but I agree with you after the whole shitshow
About Linux, I feel Con Kolivas, a former Linux kernel dev said is very accurate. There could be a bug in the kernel that causes desktop use case go to a crawl or freeze can be ignored for years, but Oracle reports there is a bug in the server usecase that causes a 0.5% of performance lost once per month and the same day it will be fixed.
Enterprise use simply eclipse the focus of the devs to regular people use. Which just only highlights even more why the desktop experience improved so rapidly when Valve decided they wanted Linux for gaming. Simply there wasn’t anyone that cared for the end user experience and wasn’t running their own fork (yes, I am talking about Google).
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This sort of thing is quite different technically.
With Inkscape, blender and gimp - the main draw is an extremely complicated UI that produces image files. A social network is just sending text around back and forth.
The beauty here is the activitypub spec. The way it works is like:
ActivityPub Protocol <- Lemmy Backend <- Lemmy Client
Building a replacement backend or client is comparatively trivial. Making a good one would be hard, of course, but a single developer could whip up something that’s technically a lemmy client, or technically a activitypub backend over a weekend.
That decoupled layering, the idea that each bit just does one comparatively simple thing, is intentional.
If lemmy/kbin catch on (which it looks like they are), it will be not long at all before there are a a plethora of tools and clients cross platform.
I do truly believe fediverse is the future. I also like it because it’s a bit closer conceptually to old-school forums, each hosted as its own server. With a difference here of added convenience of inter-connectibility. It’s also so cool to be the early adopter with the tech still a bit rough around the edges.
Also don’t let media tell you that something is dead.
If people are using it, it’s not dead.
If you’re getting value out of it, it’s not dead.
Something doesn’t need to have half the world using it to not be dead.This is such a nice mentality to have. Believing in the value of things of your own accord also helps you become resistant to marketing tactics such as planned obsolescence! Instead of being told that something is of no worth anymore and keeping on buying the latest things, you end up appreciating the things you have for what they’re worth, leading to a more sustainable outlook of life and more conscientious consumption.
Yup, you can definitely extend this way past social media. Whatever it is, if it works for you, don’t let anyone tell you that it shouldn’t. It’s too easy to get swept up in opinions of the masses. I like quiet spaces. You hear much more there.
Every game discussion. Starting roughly 24h after a game’s release until decades later.
If a game has flaws it has character.
I’ve only been here a few days, but I genuinely think the Fediverse is the future of social media. It’s not yet polished, but the potential of it all was an epiphany when I finally understood it. I’d forgotten what the real Internet was.
It was about two years ago that Matrix finally stuck for me, and while I actually tried using Mastodon, I don’t like following people. Hashtags help, but it’s not the same as a community.
For the topics I want to engage in, the critical mass is already here.
And the users control it not some corporate entity. There will be no ads, no tracking and no shareholders. The revolution will not be televised
Fuck yes, could not phrase it better. I had forgotten what the Internet was.
Hosting costs are going to bite everyone in the ass. That’s the opportunity for corporations to step in and slowly fuck things up. So right now, if you look at the instances, there are a lot of topic overlap, like gaming. Now imagine down the road that say, Steam hosts their own gaming instance. People flock to it as a centralized discussion opportunity. We could easily end up back to a very corporate controlled situation.
I’m okay with the existence of the corporate run server in your example so long as alternatives remain available and that corporate server can’t start requesting removal of “competition.”
Some amount of centralization isn’t bad, so long as people can still choose to be elsewhere.
A corporate run Lemmy server can remove competition by simply choosing not to federate with any other instance.
But that would be fine, wouldn’t it? Then they wouldn’t show up elsewhere, they would basically be using lemmy as a template to make a standalone website. If they want the general audience, they would have to create a general experience that is better than being connected to all the other servers, and that would be a lot of work.
But maybe I’ve misunderstood it, because I’m new to all this.
This
That communities, and unfortunately whole instances might turn to shit is more of a given. The big advantage is the switch would be a lot smoother. If reddit was a gargantuan instance, the loss would still be catastrophic, however the ecosystem would remain in tact. That is the user interface, the third party apps and so on. Right now everything is completely leveled and you need to start from scratch.
This could very well be the future. Especially considering certain big tech companies (like Meta) are already trying to make their own implementations of ActivityPub. However, people are discussing ways to possibly mitigate this, like multireddits.
fediverse, eli5?
That’s the best explanation I have seen so far.
This is really good. When Reddit un-blacks out I am going to replace all my comments with “Left for Lemmy” and a link to this image.
It’s all quite cool. But what confuses me is that people can use mastadon to follow the lemmyverse.
They all use the same protocol, but developers pick and choose features and how they are presented. They may be able to talk to each other but the experience also may not be ideal, especially if they use different features in different ways. For example, until a few days ago kbin upvotes didn’t show up in Lemmy at all, and Lemmy upvotes did not show as upvotes in kbin, because they used different features to describe them (kbin used boosts, which exist in Mastodon but are not implemented in Lemmy).
You are in your house, I am in mine. But we can still watch movies together through your window.
This is how I watch all my movies now, I had to find a way that Netflix can’t crack down on
What I am not understanding is the concept of logging in another server. I created an account on feddit.it, can I use this account to login in a mastodon website? Or does it work the other way around, with me just using the feddit.it website (like I’m doing right now) to consume content from other instances? With the second option, if feddit.it goes down, my account is done, right?
That’s what I think happens but I’d like to know too
I don’t think Lemmy has good support for viewing Mastodon content (unlike kbin), but you can view/follow users, threads and comments from Lemmy on Mastodon by searching
@whateveryouwant@instanceYou do everything from your home server.
So you’re at feddit.it, instead of going to https:/lemmy.world/c/lemmy.world you go to https://feddit.it/c/lemmy.world@lemmy.world
I don’t know how posting between mastodon and lemmy works.
And yes, if your instance dies, your account is gone. Mastodon has a “transfer account to another instance” feature, but Lemmy does not yet, but I’m pretty sure redundancy in some form is planned.
Your account credentials are the keys to your house, you can only enter to your own house (server/instance) with your keys, but can watch through everyone’s window (the owner of your house can block some specific windows tho).
So your second assessment is correct, and yeah I think if the server goes down your data in that instance may be lost. It shouldn’t pass long time before some migration account feature (mastodon already has one).
Great ELI5, thanks.
based on the same concepts as email, you pick your provider (instance) and you can get messages from anyone using a provider supporting the protocol. The naming system is similar @<username>@instance and !<community>@instance
I really do believe the fediverse is the future. We’ve gone from: Traditional Forums, to the early days of twitter/reddit “the golden days” to present day money driven social media platforms. I really do believe the future is a platform like the fediverse where ultimately. It sounds far more sustainable.
It’s nice to have multiple communities not just one dominant commuity like reddit has. It means that those who don’t agree with a community that might be power abusing can find an alternate one on a different instance.
I think communities could have a responsibility to go cross-instance and work with other similar communities so the user can sub to multiple ones and still get as much content as they would on reddit. It really does feel like the future of the internet. I would really like one that takes away the power from big business. Internet always felt wonderful in it’s hayday being untouched by corporations. I would really like to restore and preserve that feeling but those days may well be over if things don’t change.
there is something endearing about using this new technology that’s a bit rough around the edges.
The year of the fediverse can’t come soon enough
It should come right after year of the Linux.
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Then we’re doomed. I use linux (Fedora) as my daily drive, but I don’t see it becoming more popular than Windows in the near future.
The Linux Desktop has been improving by leaps and bounds over the last few years.
More popular than the OS with majority market share is an unrealistically high bar for success. I could totally see linux become a mainstream desktop OS at some point.
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It’s definitely growing, but is still mainly used by techie people. Lots of people are still afraid of the command line or remember how was Linux +10 years ago. We’ll have to do our part!
I think with handhelds becoming more and more viable, and thus hopefully more popular, steamOS and other distro’s will be a must because of the god awfull windows handheld support. And with more people using them, they will also get better over time.
Gaming is the biggest thing that prevents me from switching entirely to Linux, unfortunately
It was my main concern, so I dualboot (my main drive 500gb SSD runs Fedora while I have another SSD of 1TB with Windows 10).
Most games I play are running flawless on fedora (rn I’m playing No Mans Sky), as most Steam Games (you can check protondb for your favorite titles) and I’ve been more than a month without booting windows, but other titles as Fortnite can’t run on Linux.
For your games on Epic and GOG you can use Heroic Launcher. Gaming on Linux is getting easier on daily basis.
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That’s really cool—thanks for the insight! I might have to look into that one day. I’m already using three hard drives, and nothing would prevent me from having Linux on one of them. One last question if you don’t mind, how do you handle spreadsheets? I have to admit I’m quite experienced (read: locked in) with Microsoft Excel, which I do use for personal things regularly. Do you use Open Office (which has never grown on me), Google Sheets, something else? I guess that could also be a case of booting up Windows but it feels a bit cumbersome just for that.
Also, you can always try Linux first in a Virtual Machine (for example VirtualBox) to get a feeling of it without altering your hard drives, I started that way!
Regarding spreadsheets, I use LibreOffice Calc. Is not as feature rich as Excel but for me it gets the job done. I’m not sure if it works, but maybe you can set up a Windows Virtual Machine in Linux to use excel in it.
Gaming on Linux is still far from perfect as for example lack of proper Game Pass hurts a lot. Nevertheless it’s way better than I thought 3-4 years ago it would ever be. Valve is doing amazing work with Proton and Steam Deck is surprisingly compatible with almost anything I throw at it.
