I do a presentation of the Fediverse to my college students and will soon be giving short workshops to organization as well. I realize that a viable, decentralized altenative to Facebook is IMO the biggest missing piece of the puzzle. We need something that offers some kind of central platform for networking, events, groups, etc. For work related stuff I present Nexcloud. Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed and Loops are getting really interesting and working alternative to their counterparts. I believe if we could get a massive movement of people to adopt an FOSS alternative to Facebook, everything else would easily follow. What do you people think, what would you recommend? I haven’t tried Friendica yet.
One huge problem is that most people on Facebook neither know nor care what sinister things Meta are doing to them. Everyone thinks they’re immune to propaganda, and most people don’t understand the true extent with which they’re being tracked or what’s being done with that data.
Getting the core of FB users to move off FB is going to be REALLY hard.
Because people who would love to get off of it are connected there to people who think it is just fine. And those people are also afraid of change.
It’s not a matter of software choice, in my opinion. It’s the network effect. Everybody is on Facebook.
Despite its falling out of favor of the younger generation, it still has massive inertia. There’s also the issue of (I think) the overall weariness of being on social media. The halcyon days of that is over; it has become a utility at best.
I think part of the reason I enjoy the fediverse is that it reminds me of the old Internet: loosely connected, federated but independent. We had irc for chat, usenet, and mailing lists. We had like half a dozen IM platforms and tons of bulletin boards.
With that in mind, the solution may be to just let the fediverse evolve: let people find the media that works for them, whether they are into photography, music, politics, whatever. Use the software that makes sense. You don’t have to declare a victor.
The real threat isn’t Facebook: it’s centralization and censorship. The more distributed and heterogenous your ecosystem is, the safer you will be.
The main advantage Facebook has is the network effect. Everybody’s on there so it makes little sense to go anywhere else. That will be very hard to overcome no matter how good the alternatives get.
I haven’t tried Friendica yet.
The answer is Friendica.
Alternatives do exist; the real thing that’s been missing is the user base. Barely anyone is on it.
As an example: we have 9.1 million people in Quebec, Canada. How many are on Friendica?
Not even a hundred.
USERS are what’s missing.
