Given the situation with TikTok—marked by censorship and the app's recent control by MAGA-aligned interests—I checked Reddit to see what TikTok users are saying. It turns out many are asking for alternatives. Most replies suggest other proprietary apps, and I haven’t seen any recommendations for decentralized platforms like LOOPS and others from the Fediverse.

In my opinion, we now have a small but critical window of opportunity to introduce people to the Fediverse. We need to go where young people are—Reddit, Instagram, or whatever platforms they use—and explain the basics of decentralization and why choosing another proprietary app will only lead to the same outcome. LOOPS is easy to join and feels exactly like Tiktok.

I had the chance to discuss this topic with my college students just last semester. Young people are not the “imbeciles” mainstream media often portrays them to be. They see what’s happening and want to participate in change. I am firmly convinced that they are a key component of the social revolution we need, and that with their help, we could dismantle the GAFAM economy in just a few weeks.

So I believe we have to seize this moment: share, explain, and promote the Fediverse wherever you can—especially in the coming days—because every invitation is a step toward a truly free and user-owned internet.

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[–] HarkMahlberg@kbin.earth 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Just checked my blocklist to remind myself and... yep. Yeah that's a big blindspot for us, the pruning and curating of the space has to be done by hand. New users, and especially younger users, are often used to that being done for them by the platform itself.

The fediverse is like a massive yet untamed garden filled with various species, some beautiful, many poisonous. They don't see gloves and shears and see opportunity, they see a chore.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 2 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Agreed.

It does not help that moderation reports do not federate among Lemmy instances. They do in PieFed, I don't know about Mbin, but between Lemmy instances they do not, making the level of effort placed upon moderators really high by limiting the available pool to those on the same instance as the community.

It also does not help when instance admins protect those doing the bullying, such as hexbear admins that have even been caught lying to the admins of other instances, and refuse to police (i.e. ban) their own account holders as they constantly violate the rules on other instances. At that point, defederation becomes the only option left, except that many instances including yours are so high averse to defederations that instead the behaviors in question are essentially given carte blanche to continue without any means at all to stop it.

A fact that new visitors very much see - even if we old hands do not anymore, after having set up personal blocks aka blacklisting or otherwise view only Subscribed content aka exclude such via our whitelisting procedure. And new users that see what we have chosen to forget exists here go back and tell others about how unfriendly this place was to them.

So long as we leave the vast majority of the moderation burden on the individual user themselves, the Threadiverse is not going to grow and instead will continue to shrink. i.e. all the weeds are choking the garden.

[–] MousePotatoDoesStuff@lemmy.world 1 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

Does defederating from hexbear also require defederating from other instances thar federate with hexbear?

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

No? Life is rarely binary.

For instance PieFed.zip both does not defederate with hexbear while at the same time not exposing new users to them unawares by placing a user-level block (which unlike Lemmy's actually stops showing all content from those users) upon new account creation but then explains to the user how to remove that at any time. This makes interactions with them opt-in rather than have to discover it and be opt-out, so I consider it ideal. (Although I haven't tested how that would show up to users browsing without an account - that might be a loophole.)

Or, a true opt-out solution could place a message underneath every post from that instance explaining how users are known to be combative, arguing in bad faith for "the dunk" and extremely likely to break your own instance's rules and not conform to generally accepted standards of behavior. Something similar is done for Beehaw on PieFed.social, using that community's own exact wording and linking to their ToS that differs greatly from the norm. However, I would wager that virtually all 3rd party apps would ignore this.

Defederation is not a first resort, it is rather the last one and for Lemmy, literally the only one provided when instance admins refuse to enforce both the rules of others and even their own stated ones (to keep trolling inside the community yet do not spread it to others WITHOUT CONSENT). Defederation from hexbear is not punitive - even members of hexbear have expressed a desire to defederate themselves from the outside world, to avoid all this drama - but rather protective of the wider Threadiverse overall, for new members to feel more comfortable joining us here.

[–] MousePotatoDoesStuff@lemmy.world 2 points 4 hours ago

Got it. Thanks for the answer!

[–] HarkMahlberg@kbin.earth 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

The way I understand the ActivityPyb protocol, it is Publisher/Subscriber paradigm. That means when you federate with another instance, you receive (Subscribe to) the things they Publish, and they subscribe to the things Hexbear publishes. So they don't "reblog" Hexbear just because they receive Hexbear content. Their users would have to deliberately reshare the content in some way (on Kbin/Mbin, this is done by Boosting, on Mastodon it's Resharing, etc etc).

[–] MousePotatoDoesStuff@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

Oh, okay. Got it.

Thanks for the answer!