I always find these arguments are almost in bad faith. Sure there are always alternatives, but that’s like saying the alternative to driving to work is walking. It works, but only so far as it is practical. I am so glad I found Lemmy and fortunately the community has been forced here by Reddit, but how many posts were on this platform 2 days ago, how many will be here in a week? I am hopeful this will last, but platforms are only as powerful as their users, and the general public tends to congregate in the largest, easiest to use location.
For me at least, I found here the same kind of content I used Reddit for, so as long as these stay around I have good reason to do so.
I also like the federation “movement”, (imo) it feels more cozy and enhances the sense of a community.
i havent seen content on reddit like this in years
I remember the before fore times, things spread fine, you talked to your friends fine, you just didnt have immediate access to rooms full of millions, you actually had to say something worth being shared to such a scope (esp the times when its sub-optimal to not be able to plead to the masses). Federation can fix a lot of the obvious issues with that older setup. The protocol could have been established then, we already did it for email and newsgroups.
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And with enough federated servers in the network they could never hope to have the reach of things like Lemmy and Mastodon. Server costs would be massively spread out instead of reliant on one corporation.
It’s even possible to run it on old PC that wasn’t used long ago, so everything will be good as long as community exist
pretty much. never underestimate the will of the at home datacentre crowd, with muliple last gen enterprise servers, decades of sysadmin experience and business+ class internet connections to feed their tech addiction.
I expect a nice little swarm of small to medium capacity instances popping up hidden behind cloud load balancers and Tor onion services very soon.
this cant replace a near boundless elastic cloud setup, but it is much more in line with the ethos I am down with and should provide some of what we need to keep things going.
edit: typo
thats ok, big tech cant really make money off this anyway, the proof is in the pudding, just let us run our space, go throw some crap on billboards and on our video streams. its insane we need brokers and gatekeepers for simple formatted text messages.
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Be careful with that thinking. That way can lead to complacency. Big tech loves embrace, extend, extinguish
I could see a corp like Microsoft or Google or someone else seeing long term value in federated services. They could create a service utilizing the technology and spread it to their user base. Slowly add in some special sauce to their own version of it to attract more people to their part of it. Then break compatibility with everything else to stop someone from stealing users back.
I think Meta is doing something with ActivityPub
Looks like they smell blood in the water with Twitter’s downward spiral.
That’s what you have to look out for. They will exploit anything they can get their hands on if they think there is money to be made.
How exactly is Meta’s new platform going to work? It’s still confusing me a bit.
once enough people are in they defederate from everything and then immediately start enshittifying until it becomes yet another big tech platform
They probably won’t even have to defederate. Become big enough that you can dictate the standards of federation in a way that profits you.
There is a great site called https://alternativeto.net where you can search for open source software that you could use instead of a proprietary one. For exampe Photoshop -> Gimp
I know there arent perfect alternatives for everything but i found a few cool ones for myself that i use every day now.
i mean yeah you can find an alternative of a certain service, the problem is the little or few content are in certain services or a few little community engaging.
Be the change. If few people actively try to build an alternative the network effect will do the rest.
