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.
as others have stated, Friendica. The issue is finding a stable working instance. I was on Friendica.world but doesn’t work anymore as far as I can tell.
Friendica exists.
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.
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.
The flip side of that same coin is that, IME, fediverse developers champion data privacy, anonymity, and decentralization. Users should never offer that much personal data to one platform, so they build and advocate for platforms that don’t require that data. Building a lowercase-f facebook on the fediverse would betray that foundation.
I haven’t tried Friendica yet.
The answer is Friendica.
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.
I think something protocol based might be nice. Don’t go to a website, install a program that uses an open protocol. Better for real decentralization, no cookies, no web tracking, just text and maybe pics.
friendica
I havent tried it in the recent years. Is it coming togheter? Like with groups, events, etc?
It has all of them, but it’s bare bones and doesn’t scale well. The instance where I have an account regularly falls over - sometimes for months at a time. Most of my friends there haven’t returned.
I don’t feel it’s currently a viable Facebook alternative, and it would need monumental amounts of work for it to become one.
I had a browse of the code recently. It’s really well put together, I think they have a great foundation it just needs to be optimized. I’m hopeful about friendica.
agree with the scaling issue. i tried an instance with 300 members and it was too slow to use,
dunno about groups but they have events via mobilizon another federated app that is for events
No, ime, it looks outdated. See every other comment in this thread for why that is.
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.
Facebook is like Myspace: it’s has-been. If I was a developers interested in contributing to the Fediverse, that’s the last social media I’d choose to spend my time reimplementing.
No matter what your opinion on fb is, each time I do my presentation, it’s the main thing people ask me for. To my suprise, even my students in their young 20s are using it a lot, and it’s the main platform for people over 40. Billion of people uses it everyday so I wouldn’t call it has-been. If we could bring even a small percentage of these people to the fedi, it would destabilise the economic model social media is based on. I’m not saying I like fb, I actually never have, but we can’t pretend people are over with it.
I suspect a lot of people use Facebook because they’ve always used Facebook - mostly older folks at this point - and a lot of the younger folks go there because their favorite association / football club / local restaurant / library are there too.
Meaning Facebook’s success today is mostly inertia: there’s no way any open-source replacement would pull a critical-enough mass of people away from Facebook to fight the inertia and enjoy any meaningful success. I’m pretty sure open-source developers know this and chose something fancier and more exciting to spend their time on.
Creating a Facebook replacement would be about as exciting as creating a Visual Basic replacement: millions of people still use VB, but nobody wants to touch a dying technology.
I’m pretty much forced to use Facebook and Messenger because of school. Some teachers will grade you only if you upload your work and tag them on Facebook, sometimes you have to repost or like videos because your project is a video and there’s a group competition based on those metrics. Messenger is the default mode of communication between students and teachers, as well as a way to contact people for your graded surveys.
I’ve avoided Facebook for so long, the idea that it’s required as part of an ‘education system’ bewilders me. Wow.
GroupMe (Microsoft) and Discord isn’t required for pure learning purposes, but 99% of clubs at my school use them, so I’d be unable to participate in a lot of shit if I dropped them.
Instead we just get stalked by Canvas for any assignment/classwork related purposes. Oh, and lockdown browser for online tests…
But I could totally believe teachers forcing students to use some shitty app to communicate with students and submit work.
You have no idea how deep the education system is now into gafam. To study in Quebec now, you absolutly need a cell phone with ms authenticator, teams is basically mandatory, etc. I’m one of the only teacher at my college that cares enough to show use and show foss alternative to my students. For example Moodle is the most powerfull tool a teacher could dream of for grades, quizz, file sharing, assigments, etc. Yet most teachers prefer ms bullshit suite for everything…
Report those fuckers to the school board and files complaints.
People need to protest social media as part of education and fuck schools that vendor lock in their students to M$ bullshit as well.
It is not feasible unfortunately, and if I were to put that as a complaint, I would most likely be called unhinged, out-of-touch, or trying to discard a perfectly usable system. We can only raise questions and influence people as of now. Besides, the reason why Messenger is popular is because of the freebasics service which allows people to use Messenger for free.
lol fuck that apathetic attitude.
We all need to be sand in their oligarch machines.
Schools need to teach that “FREE” does not mean free. Might be another good thing to bring up with the school board cause clearly that’s a lesson they didn’t learn.
Apathetic attitude? Not everyone has the privilege of having ever been under an authority figure who actually cares about their job. My university can’t even bother to fix their drainage system, my city has had its reputation dragged in the mud on national TV for its shitty (literally) garbage collection system (btw, I still see NOTHING came out from the publicity), even though people have been complaining about these for months. Do you seriously think they’ll take my opinion seriously? If I try to rally people to my cause, which would most likely be on Facebook, people would just snarkily say I’m overreacting and that I’m a hypocrite for using Facebook (which is the only way I could reach them in the first place). Even when I complained about the drainage system I was being name-called and insulted by someone who thought that making any demands to a school as a student was being entitled and what did I get out of it? Nothing! Do you think the geriatrics at the upper level even care about privacy or information? They still admire Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg goddammit! Have you ever had to really fight for a cause? Because you are painting an unrealistic landscape that I’ve never been able to see my entire life.
Sorry to hear about the situation you’re in but that doesn’t mean you should stop. Means you are targeting the wrong people and doing this alone.
A broken drainage system is something you could get a few people behind and go at it as a group.
Don’t crumble or think because as a student you can’t do anything. You have to get organized and get others involved. One person calling you names won’t matter at that point.
I’m actively part of multiple groups working on what we can to throw sand into their machines. Sometimes it’s small victories but at least it’s getting the message out there.
I understand that’s not safe to do in every country, but these things need to be addressed. Cause if we don’t, nobody will.
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.
Isn’t basically any software like mastodon where you change the maximum length of posts to be long enough a good alternative? say 1 million words per post.
For group discussions there is piefed/lemmy. And mobilizon for events. for reviews there is neodb.
When i last tried friendica. it was missing the feature which i thought was really good on facebook. seeing what people i appreciate are into by seeing stuff like movies and or even things like meditation or stoicism on their profile page. and maybe reviews of businesses
