No one CEO can ruin it.

Right now we’re seeing a cycle of people jumping ship from one corporate-owned platform to another, until that new platform inevitably turns to shit. But as long as people keep doing that, corporate-owned platforms will inevitably turn to shit. The only true solution is to cut corporations out of the picture with platforms that are designed to be unruinable.

Because they were banned from Reddit for saying that “If you have the chance to punch a Nazi, you should always punch the Nazi.” 😅

“last week tonight” just published an episode on that topic

Its free and fun

Do you like communism? Scratch that, do you like China? Then Lemmy is perfect for you!

My pitch is:

At the end of Web 1.0 and the start of Web 2.0 there was a rich ecosystem of forums, blogs (micro and macro), wikis, etc. However, you needed a different login for each one and the large social media companies, Big Web, saw their opportunity and made a more convenient offering - a site where everyone could go and talk to each other. That seemed great until a critical mass of people joined and then they found themselves locked into a walled garden, imprisoned by the network effect. That’s when the enshittification started.

What the Fediverse is doing is rewinding to before the takeover by the Big Web and asking where the Small Web would have evolved to if it hadn’t been sidelined. The answer is a protocol that would allow all those sites to speak to each other. And right there are the first glimmerings of the direction we should have taken - diaspora* and Friendica started in 2010, in fact it is felt in some quarters that Google+ (2011 until it was finished off by Facebook and Google’s short attention span) lifted some features from them. Unfortunately, the Big Web smothered such innovations, and it is only now that the Fediverse’s time has come.

The beauty of federation is you don’t have to believe someone who is running an instance if they say they won’t be evil, federation acts like a Ulysses Pact. y You can’t be evil because the barrier to moving is so much lower because the network effect doesn’t handcuff you to one instance. If an Admin starts power-tripping, you can move to another instance and carry on where you left off.

The centralized social media have demonstrated again and again that content moderation at scale can never work well the way they do it. They are a menace to society. The problem isn’t that Elon Musk is the wrong person to decide how a billion people should be allowed to talk to each other and which of their voices should be amplified, it’s that nobody should ever have that power.

A diverse network of smaller instances where each is free to take its own approach is the future of social media, if it has a future.

Star Trek memes. I didn’t even know I liked Star Trek until 2 years ago.

Yeeeah, if you have to write a network of interconnected arguments in multiple languages the answer you’re transmitting may not be the one you want.

Federated apps and communities may be better off working to be appealing and less explaining why they think they already are.

I can host it and have 100% what I consume and who I don’t interact with.

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.

The Fediverse is diverse. Do you want something looking like the original Instagram? We’ve got it. Just a Twitter-clone (without algorithms)? We got it too. Something like Reddit? Sure thing, why not! Something to track your books with? Yeah, that’s around as well. Something doesn’t exist yet? Don’t worry, it eventually will! 😋

And the fun thing… Most of the platforms can interact with each other since they speak mostly the same language on the same network! You don’t like the interface of Mastodon? No worries, go use Misskey or Akkoma or whatever! Mastodon-users will still be able to read your posts! No more moving to a nicer looking platform and finding out that all your followers have to move along too or you’d be shouting all alone into the void!

To procrastinate.

Because you’re sick of being toyed with by billionaire’s algorithms designed to wring everything last drop out of you they can.

There’s stuff you want to interact with there.