We have plenty of foss stuff ready to go and deployed. But we don’t want it. We want free ad supported American platforms. No one cares. It’s pretty annoying for the people that do, but alas.
We have plenty of foss stuff ready to go and deployed. But we don’t want it. We want free ad supported American platforms. No one cares. It’s pretty annoying for the people that do, but alas.
I don't think people care AT ALL about FOSS, however, they do care somewhat about privacy and sovereignty. But at the end of the day, they need to have the network of people they care about already on the platform and they need a smooth experience.
The moment the U.S. moved to ban TikTok, users immediately flocked to an even worse Chinese platform. People don’t actually care about privacy or digital sovereignty — not when convenience and clout are on the line.
It's a matter of degree. The average Joe cares about privacy and tech sovereignty too, but not to the extent that he would sign off a platform where the rest of his friends are.
I try not to be cynical, but I honestly don't think they even care about that with all things being equal.
I'm talking about the 90+% of people, not the people we all probably know. It's not about elitism either, it's just human nature. People care about the ends, not the means.
Even with all things being equal, if you offer X covered in shinies, you will win over someone just offering X. Companies like Meta are very good at covering their products with shinies, and governments are not.
Hmm, well I don't know. Not everyone like the same kind of shiny stuff. And even if you like some kind of shiny, sometime a huge load of it is just too much of it. Even the most bling bling people will die if you really put them under a metal mountain of gold.
You might think smart people will better well balance than not the poison in their drug to keep their junky customer base just afloat so business have a perennial flow of serfs. But even smart people are humans and make errors. And even if they plan with error rate in mind, they can be overthrown by one of their many far more stupid rivals. The number of mindless wannabe will always largely exceeds the anticipation power of the sharpest minds.
> I don't think people care AT ALL about FOSS
Clearly most people just don't care about freedom at all in general. They claim they do, but then will argue against anything and everything that provides even the tiniest measure of it.
Most people don't have integrity, and are moderately failed educations. They are doing whatever they do in more of a mimic fashion than actually understanding anything.
Centralised platforms have strong economic incentives to invade privacy.
Its not really about FOSS vs proprietary. FOSS is better because it can be verified, but, for example, Whatsapp is better than a FOSS platform that is not E2EE and not decentralised.
Ideally we would use decentralised, E2EE encrypted FOSS.
Governments also like centralised platforms because they enable surveillance.
or they can just talk to their network IRL :)
If everyone is locked up in the same prison, then the network of people they care about is on the platform.
... but you're not wrong, I'm afraid.
No one cares as long as the end product is worse and doesn't satisfy the users' requirements. If we want people to use non-American alternatives we need to build alternatives that are straight up better, which is exactly what the Chinese managed to do with TikTok.
Moving from American companies to Chinese ones does not qualify as any progress in the "How much of my online presence do I own" metric.
That’s not what the person you’re replying to said
Yeah, and their response is also not related to the topic at hand. We are not arguing about moving away from US-controlled platforms because we are measuring what is "better". We are talking about leaving US-owned platforms in order to have a sovereign alternative.
Speaking as someone from Europe i remember the time we switched from a local social media site to Facebook on mass because Facebook was a better experience.
So a better platform is a must have if the EU wants the digital sovereign social media to have any traction. Most people just don't care enough about abstract concepts like digital sovereignty to move to a worse platform.
> Most people just don't care enough about abstract concepts like digital sovereignty to move to a worse platform.
Companies care about it, which by extension should make some of their employees care as well.
(Saying this "out loud" made be realize one thing: maybe I should stop trying to make "get out of Twitter and come to Mastodon" happen, and get Communick to focus on companies and recruiters that want an alternative to LinkedIn?)
Other than the points already made in replies, there's the fact that the only thing discussed in those places is how terrible the thing they're trying to replace is.
Every so often I get curious about something like Mastadon or Bluesky because it comes up here again. So I head over to see whatsup, and it's just post after post about how terrible Twitter is, and how badly it's doing now. Okay, I get it, you moved from Twitter because of blah, can you move on to all the things you _wanted_ to post on Twitter now?
I don't know which circles you visit, but out of my discover feed only one was lamenting about the old internet. Nobody was talking about other social media, the topics that dominated was stock market, stock market, and more stock market.
> there's the fact that the only thing discussed in those places is how terrible the thing they're trying to replace is.
If you only go check it after there is some major news that get people talking about it, then yes you'll probably end up seeing mostly this annoying meta-conversation around the Fediverse.
However, if you manage to stick around just a bit longer you will see that there is a tiny-but-growing number of people who are using Mastodon/Lemmy/Peertube "just" because they have found enough interesting people and conversation.
There is also nothing stopping you from taking initiative and starting the conversation around other, "better" topics. I made a habit of posting at least 3-5 links every day to Lemmy. You can always push out some introduction post on Mastodon with some relevant hashtags to see if you can help bootstrap a community, etc.
[0]: https://communick.news/u/rglullis?page=1&sort=New&view=Posts
As with most[^1] social platforms, what you see is determined by who you follow.
[^1] "Most" may be an overstatement these days.
Not true on FB anymore, but a long way. What I see in my feed.
1. Racist meme - probably because I am visible ethnic minority so they hope it is rage bait. I continue to see a lot of wolf whistle racism on FB although I ignore it. A lot of it reads like it is written by someone who is not a native English speaker.
2. Sponsored post advertising a course for kids who want to be lawyers. Probably because I have a teenage daughter and I am an admin of two home education related groups. Not relevant to anything my kids wants to do though.
3. A post from a group I am in.
4. A stupid anti-home ed post - one of these ones where they take an image of a post somehwere else and mock it. More rage bait. It also talks about American stuff (you have school taxes, apparent?) and I am in the UK.
5. A map from a group I am not in that is copied from Our World in Data.
6. A sponsored post for a luxury bed.
7. A meme from a group I think is stupid, suggesting you encourage your daughters to dress modestly.
8. Pictures posted by a friend.
9. A post from a group I am in..
10. A post from someone I have never heard of.
That makes three determined by who I follow, to seven algorithmically chosen.
>I continue to see a lot of wolf whistle racism on FB although I ignore it. A lot of it reads like it is written by someone who is not a native English speaker.
I'm sure you had nothing like this in mind, but I found this humorous:
"There's a lot of racism on Facebook" "But I'm sure it's written by those illiterate foreigners"
Again, i'n certain you don't actually think like that, just letting you know how it can be misinterpreted because I'm above average sensitive about that (being ESL myself).
Of course I did not intend that. In think its significance is that it is intended to be rage bait, rather than being written by genuine racists.
That's an ingestion problem
Yeah, FB got this bad over the last years. I was a big advocate for Facebook, I really saw the value in having a feed based on posts of people/pages I choose to follow. These days, it's full of absolute garbage, if I open it by mistake, I'm disgusted.
It's just network effects. The real dirty secret of youtube is that it pays well relative to the other platforms, which ensures the vast majority of creators are on there, which in turn makes it the easiest platform to discover new content you like as a consumer and to be discovered as a new creator.
Privacy isn't the vector that is able to disrupt this (although it is a nice feature). This will get disrupted when some combination of the following tips the scales on a new platform enough to make the gulf in discovery small: - google screws with the search enough to make it hard to discover content users want (they are already 20% of the way to unusable at this point and getting worse every year),
- Someone makes an even worse for addiction platform that siphons the younger generation off who doesn't want to be on uncoool old guy's platform (i.e. what tiktok did to facebook/insta but also to some extent to youtube).
- Someone spends a crazy amount of money to pull creators off youtube onto their platform (nobody has spent enough money as diversely yet. spotify tried this half heartedly with rogan and twitch has tried it half heartedly with a few streamers but hasn't fixed their rev sharing so they are basically poison to everyone not big enough to get a sweetheart deal contract)
What do you have in mind? I am not aware of any foss platform, European or not, that is as accessible as Meta'a networks are. If you get asked about a server choice during the registration process, it's game over.
The sad thing is, we had social networks in Europe, things like Nasza Klasa and Hyves. But Facebook is ate them all, I'm not sure why. I'm also not sure why VKontakte survived, possibly because they became a blatant copy of Facebook as fast as they could.
Nasza Klasa (literally "our class", as in school) was crazy incompetent though. They had all social groups there - young and older kids, young adults, adults, even some elderly people - and they somehow randomly decided to focus purely on school kids, alienating everyone else. And since they were so bad at it, it became a meme, was not cool anymore and everyone left to facebook.
It's really a shame, I think it could thrive regionally until today . Big tech doesn't always win - for example also in Poland AWS tried and failed to win the market several times, because there's an existing platform that everyone uses already.
What do you mean with "as accessible"?
All the link I receive hosted by them will only show door kind of NDA or whatever you call a "click here to mindlessly accept all our ridiculous terms".
> that is as accessible as Meta'a networks are.
Meta's networks mostly inaccessible to the public. Only registered users - who IIANM are people who establish their identity vis-a-vis meta, with a phone number, or what-not - can access them.
This is a easy cynical view, except that we've already migrated en masse between platforms several times. The issue at hand is the network effect, and it also happens automatically with each new generation of "eww, my parents social network". What Europe would probably get if wanted, is a rolling creation of social networks that are active at the same time.
Free (as in beer) and centralized or giving the impression of working as a centralized system. That seems to mean it must be ad supported, or run on donations.
What doesn’t work is trying to invent some open/stabdardized/distributed system. I’m happy to be proven wrong but we haven’t seen that work because they invariably have some drawback that the centralized systems don’t, while too few care about their benefits.
I don’t think anyone cares strongly about the origin if it’s American or European.
Can the EU promotw a biz model where the max charge is 0.99€ a month and the annual renewal defaults to negative, with limits on the number of reminder messages ? I'd sign up for those without too much worry about handing out my credit card info.
Individual level action is insufficient to overpower network effects in the service of the public good of maintaining sovereignty. The desired outcome is just not connected to an individual's incentives to a strong enough degree. State action is needed.
Once again, I urge people to read Taleb before giving in to apathy:
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict....
It would take only one high-profile European institution to drop Twitter and set up their own server on the Fediverse - e.g, The Spanish "La Liga" running their own server for all the clubs and players eligible to play in UEFA - to get a good amount of people rushing to find out how to set up their own account.
Looks like an interesting read, I'll finish it in a minute, but I just want to say, as someone working in a medium profile public institution...
Yeah our PR team would love this idea. What would actually happen is that nobody would read our updates, except that one or two journalists who repost it immediately on Twitter and X.
A "medium profile public institution" can not make their own gravity, like La Liga can.
For them, I'd recommend to take a POSSE [0] approach: create their own instance and treat the other platforms as mere syndication channels. This would allow them to not lose any of their reach, but would also signal to everyone else that an exit path is available.
[0]: https://indieweb.org/POSSE
What are you talking about? The FOSS social media platforms are my favourite place to talk about FOSS social media platforms and no other topics.
Free ad-supported European platforms would probably be acceptable. The issues are:
1) The EU would probably reject US-style moderation. They don't have the same level of tolerance for speech they disagree with. HN is up to what, its 3rd public moderator? The EU would probably have some sort of law that there must be some maximum number of mods per user if they had big social platforms. What if right-wingers say something without a mod looking over it? Europeans wouldn't stand for that sort of laxity or dang's obvious moderate bias.
2) The ad-supported aspect is likely to be problematic in the EU. The regulators seem pretty suspicious of that sort of thing.
3) A lot of the interesting people who were in Europe seem to get brain-drained to the US. Most of the interesting Europeans I know are US citizens because in the US they get paid well.
That's a lot of assumptions about what the EU would do. It's also a bit rich to hold the US up as a model of free speech at a time when liberal views are being actively censured.
As for the "most interesting Europeans are Americans" thing, that's such a strange statement that I'm not sure how to respond, other than that has not been my experience.
I don't think it's a lot of assumptions at all. You hear people decrying ad-supported websites all the time. When pressed on the issue they essentially resort to "well maybe these websites shouldn't exist then!", which isn't a solution.
You also hear a lot of Europeans cry out for censorship. They just think their kind of censorship will leave them alone. Until it doesn't. But they don't have to worry about it, since they're on American platforms anyway.
Hacker News is available in Europe, it doesn't even have (or need) a cookie banner. There is nothing here that would raise any eyebrows. Americans seem to misunderstand how "non-free" speech is in Europe. It is mostly calls for violence, libel, and some historical oddities (holocaust denial in Germany) that are not allowed in public.
1. As much as I dislike the thought of law mandated overzealous moderation, you're probably right.
On the other hand, if doing this will let us avoid another genocide [1] maybe it's worth it.
2. We're concerned about privacy, but ad supported businesses are as popular as everywhere else (just regulated a bit more strictly). There's probably more fear of processing too much personal data and being sued, but it's good in my opinion as a customer.
3. Also true. But, assuming you're American, isn't the selection of Europeans your know biased? Anecdotally, most of the interesting Europeans I know are not American :).
[1] https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-i-the-setup
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