Why Are We Still On FB? It's become a pile of stuff (euphemism) and basically assaults us using psyops and propaganda, and is now blocking news from Canada and Australia. So why have we not moved on?
I like The Conversation, it's an alternate news resource like The Guardian and The New Daily that offer good alternatives to MSM Murdoch-opoly. I haven't gotten my news from Facebook for years, other than friends and family stuff, but for everyone in Canada and Australia that were hoping to get their local news, bad news. Facebook are pulling an Elon - refusing to pay their way. So tell me again - Why Are We Still On FB?
I backed right off FB for a few years, found some great alternative sites where the tendrils of corporate control aren't ever going to reach. Some are independent and trying to become the next big thing, some are federated and thus fiercely independent of any corporate interferings. I only come back to FB because of inertia. And it ain't my inertia, I've pretty much ballistic'd myself outta there. I just wish more friends and family would come over to the Good Side.
When Musk turned the bluebird to Xitter, I bailed for another platform that isn't ever going to be able to be screwed over like Twitter - and FB-Insta-Threads - are. I found more than a couple more that are all good, all have a decent user participation, and Zuck and Musk and Bezos et al aren't going to get their hooks into.
When Youtube got to be a shittified platform I found many alternatives, one that had almost all the video creators I enjoy, several independent platforms, and a few Federated ones.
The No-No Go Zone:
For me, the following platforms are anathema. I can't freely post what I want, and it's one of the reasons to Get Out Of Dodge. Read that link - it puts the case very well. On FB and Google properties, you're at their mercy. I can't count the number of platforms and apps Google created, that attracted a large userbase - and then they shut it down.
On FB, I can't format a post with different typefaces or font weights, but there used to be one case where one could. You'd think a rather easy editor and database change would have been - but no, they chose to do experiments on some of their users by slewing their newsfeeds, they still do that to this day and are now doing it to our local news resources.
The advantage of going to independent platforms is that a) it breaks your "brain rust" that you got from the Old Order of social sites, b) it's hard to leave a cosy comfy little cave even though it's been filling up with feces down there near the servers and c) where will all your friends go? Will they go to the same services as you? You took ten to twenty years to cultivate that particular bunch of friends. (And yet you seemingly can't get even 10% of them to take the plunge with you. Some friends, huh?)
Facebook's parent company Meta owns and operates FB, Instagram, and Threads, all of which started out as good ideas but became enshittified. Instagram started off as a great independent thing, was bought by FB/Meta and the developer promised free rein -but wouldn't you know it, they were lied to and let go. It turned into poop pretty much from that moment on.
Threads was meant as a competitor to Twitter, but I think it was only ever considered as a REALLY distant sort-of maybe kinda replacement because of Elon Ego and the Xitterapocalypse. Which brings me to Xitter, the shitterbox of IM platforms now. And 'nuff said about that.
Youtube started to become a terrible platform for smaller creators quite a while back, and rang its death-knell for me when they started encouraging the brainless short-format videos over longer more thoughtful content.
They were doing it to compete with Tiktok, which I've visited a few times and I'm still trying to get the mental stain out of my head. There's crap and there's crapper-worthy and then there are short-form videos. (Even FB has gotten onto that bandwagon, so maybe a majority of short-form content is a good way to tell which platforms are enshittified beyond redemption?)
So far I've provided no links because that's just the problem - they're so well known that you can find them on your own, and the noise is drowning out some good and very useable platforms, so I won't give those bigger platforms air.
Here are some alternatives, with my personal preference rating:
The Better Choices
MeWe
MeWe is an almost perfect FB replacement. It has Newsfeeds, a lot of Chat channels associated with every Timeline, Group, and Page, so that in mnany ways it thrashes the hell out of FB. It's also extremely privacy-oriented, so it's hard to make Public posts and that makes it hard initially to follow particular Pages Groups or people because nothing is public by default. It's also hard to share your MeWe content to another platform because - privacy. They're now experimenting with federation but once again it's going to the walled garden approach in that the federation mechanism they use is not open. That "walled garden" approach is admirable, but also the one main reason I find it hard to rate it more than a 5.
BlueSky
BlueSky is made by the people that made Twitter. It's a work in progress but very useable and already populated with a huge number of users from all over. It takes almost no getting used to if you used early Twitter. It's still missing some features like multiposts, but it's also being worked on constantly and dropping out improvements from time to time. I have to give it a solid 8. I'm not sure if registrations are open by now but if not I have invites to give away.
Matrix.
Matrix is a an open framework, you can share a document or workspace across different platforms or direct on the web, and while it's not social networking per se, it does allow you to do things that otherwise you'd have to use a proprietary and thus controlled-by-others platform for. Not being proprietary means no proprietor will suddenly decide to enshittify it for personal, financial, or political reasons.
This is the main reason I'm suggesting these alternatives at all, the very real (and now proven over and over by Meta/FB, X(itter), Google/Alphabet, and all the other disappointing original Old Order of apps) enshittification going on in those apps we once loved and that are now become just plain abusive. The high investment you have to make in getting an app to access into Matrix (at the moment I've only ever used Element) and so forth means I give this an 8 for concept but a 3 for usability.
Nebula.
Nebula is a subscription-based video platform like YouTube, and in fact many of the video creators on there are YouTubers, the difference is Nebula isn't ad-supported but rather based around a very reasonable subscription. As with all the other sevices I mention , it's here to allow you to avoid the Old Order of now-enshittified content. Rated: 8.
DailyMotion, Vimeo, Twitch, D-Tube.
These are all video sharing and streaming platforms that do what YouTube does, some with subscriptions, some free, all accessible and less likely to enshittify than YT. There's also Peertube on the federated networks but I'll get to the Fediverse in a second. Ratings: PeerTube: 7, others also solid 7s.
And here's the Fedi:
The Fediverse - MissKey, Mastodon, Peertube, PixelFed, and a whole galaxy of others.
This link will take you to a guide of Fediverse services, server instances, and give you some idea of how much social media ground the Fedi covers. It's impressive.
Mastodon is one of the best known Fedi services because, well - Elon Ego / Xitterapocalypse had people trying them all. It's all of what Twitter was but without algorithms to direct chosen content to you as X and the FB properties do, and it has a different interface and terminology for stuff you already used in FB ab Twitter.
Because of that, a lot of people felt overwhelmed and went off Fediverse stuff. But it's at its core just the same principles as those that guided you to create the social graph you now have on the carp platforms. I'm rating it an 8.
But the whole Fediverse of different servers has to get at least a 9 from me because they cover such a wide range of platforms and services, are pretty much undisruptable being so widely distributed, and did I mention they all interoperate? There's even a plugin for WordPress to connect into the Fediverse.
I predict that with a few more people aboard, this could become a whole new paradigm of Internet. There 13,000 server instances around the world, meaning it has staying power. Seven million people use the various Fedi services, that cover every aspect of online social activity from IM chat to chat to social networking to forums and even blog platforms.
One upside of the Fediverse is that ALL the servers talk the same language. If you happen to come across a mentioned post that mentions a good creator on PeerTube (yep, the YT alternative) and have their handle (@brilliantcreator@diode.zone, which happens to be where one Peertube group serves from) you can enter that handle into Mastodon, find follow and - - - you will now see their Peertube posts - including videos - scrolling in your home feed. And be able to reply!
First, a better look at the Fediverse. This link will take you to a guide that shows the range of different services, and each services has a range of servers located all around the globe, most maintained by private individuals or small companies as a social service. I'll write more on the whole Fediverse as I write a (short, not comprehensive) list of types of services that are available in the Fediverse. In fact, here's another great list of resources.
Choosing servers.
It's important to know that the choices here are pretty wide-ranging. If you want to mainly interact with a group of Allies, there are servers maintained by LGBTQI+ communities, if you want to join a bunch of computer geeks, there's a server for that too.
Then the choice - IM style chat, longer-form chat, discussion-group / forum, photo sharing, video sharing, blogging? Just like with the established and now thoroughly enshittificated Old Order social apps, you'll want to join several.
Also consider: the service server's location, the community registered on that server, and the size of the community.
- The location helps with language, and also ensures you get to see a fair proportion of local content.
- The community of people makes a difference. This will ensure you see a fair proportion of content relevant to you.
- And the size of the community matters too. A server with a lot of users may tend to offer long-term service, but it can become lagged, and your local newsfeed will be quite frantic. A tiny server with fewer than a hundred users is likely to be a closeknit group and may not offer you the content you want.
Notwithstanding those three points, just joining ANY server is a good first step, and a larger one might be helpful in the beginning. You can always move stuff to another server later. It's been made really easy, and I encourage it.
I initially joined a large server some two - three years ago, lost interest, and then the "Xittastrophe" happened. So I promptly forgot I already had an account, and started another one on another big server. mastodon.social. It was noisy and busy but I got good tips on where to find server instance lists, found another more local
found that joining a Mastodon instance that's operated by a few individuals and with a few thousand users here in Australia was a good move. For a start, my local newsfeed is populated by more Aussies, for another, that sorts out the language issues, and - more importantly - this is a medium sized server in terms of membership. That means it's not going to get hammered by tens f thousands of people accessing it, but it's large enough to avoid instability and any kind of radicalisation. (Not like, ahem, various organisations have become lately...)
The other thing to keep in mind is that this is probably not going to be your only account. You might want to join a chat service, a video service, a discussion and forum server, and a social platform that's a bit more FB-like. And you can. Right now I bet you have a FB account, a X(itter) account, another on a forum site like reddit.
It's the same on the Fedi. The only difference is that on those other accounts, you can log in FB and see your messages from X in your newsfeed, can you? If you still have Flickr, will you see your friend's hoilday snaps while logged into X or FB? You can in the Fedi.
You'll still need to have accounts on Friendica, Mastodon, pixelfed, and Peertube. But you can follw accounts from one platform, on your account on another platform. And reply to them. That right there is the beauty of Federated services.
Mastodon.
Mastodon evolved out of Diaspora, the OG federated chat service. It's the best place to get started, and also the best place to get over the initial learning curve. If you follow that link above it'll take you to the easiest way to pick a good server to join. (Some servers are occupied by photographers, some by technical people, the majority are social. In almost every case, starting with a server in your country is the best option.) Once you've found a community, you'll get lots of news from that community, and then from the broader Mastodon community worldwide.
And once you have a few followers and follows here, you can start deciding which other services will interest you, create accounts there too, and then follow people across accounts and services.
Friendica. MissKey. Pleroma.
Much like Mastodon, but with a wider range of features making them more like a FB alternative with a Mastodon-alike streams setup. The thing is, like all the other Fediverse services, is that they can interoperate, you can join one but follow people on other services.
pixelfed. PeerTube.
Miss good old photo-sharing apps? Like what Instagram and Flickr once were? pixelfed. Youtube? Try PeerTube.
Lemmy. Mobilizon.
These are designed more for discussion groups, forums, link sharing, and the like.
Writefreely. Plume.
These are writing and blogging services. There's even, as mentioned, a plugin for WordPress that allows you to reach the Fediverse audience.
Fed.brid.gy.
An interesting one because you can add a website such as a blog, then follow it just as though it were an individual on any of the Fedi services, and see when new stuff gets posted. Great for giving blogs an identity people can follow in their timelines wherever they are.
I already added one of my blogs, you can follow @ohaicorona.com@fed.brid.gy or also follow it on https://fed.brid.gy/web/ohaicorona.com from any web browser, it's a great idea.
And look - most of the Fediverse is operated by individuals off their own back, they carry the costs themselves (or some may have a link where you can donate to help cover costs) and that's one of the attractions of the Fedi - you can talk to the person running your server instance, and they're generally the nicest people. Try getting support out of Google or FB or (these days) X(itter)...
But also, and right on schedule, this happened. For the first time in the year and a bit I've been on this server instance.
This kind of thing does happen:
Went to log into mastodon.au only to be presented with the following message:
Due to some scheduled maintenance, one of the links between two of our datacenters is down.
This should IN NO WAY have broken anything. But it did. It turns out that "someone" needed an extra 10gbit link in a certain area, and replaced a simple optical joiner with a switch, instead of running a NEW optical cable. Network switches need power. Two optical fibres joined together don't. Now, because that "someone" didn't want to run a new optical cable to keep everything isolated AND managed to not write it down in the network map, that switch was installed in the an area that was scheduled for a power outage this weekend.
The work was meant to be finished by this morning (Sunday), but the outage window is until 6pm tonight. As this is out of my control, and as I explicitly agreed and confirmed that they can do this and it won't affect anything, I can't even go and ask them to hurry up. Sigh.
For anyone concerned about data loss, everything is up, I can get into everything out-of-band, it's just that they can't reach the internet.
Feel free to ask me stuff, I'm 'xxxxxx' (obscured by me. Ted/PTEC3D, to maintaion Rob's privacy) on pretty much every social, but I don't get notifications from the Xitter, try anywhere else!
Sorry!
In this case Rob was hit with an issue where the service provider he uses (just the way I use Digital Pacific ) made an unrecorded blunder and he's now stuck waiting for them to fix the issue. You take it on the chin because Rob's set up a system which is now quite large, to handle the amount of Aussie users he was getting. I've asked where I can make a regular donation but he's steadfastly refused to accept any. All out of his pocket.
I lost a day of connectivity but guess what? I was still following quite a few regular contacts on MissKey and several other Fedi services, that's where the power of federation really shines. I hadn't lost touch with the people I follow. I also have two alt accounts on two other servers, but because I knew everything was going to be fixed in a few more hours I didn't even bother to fire either alt account up. Try THAT when Elon shuts his toy site down in a fit of pique...
No comments:
Post a Comment