cabbage

I'm amazed at how fast this place has grown since the first time I saw a Lemmy instance (way before Reddit API drama), or since the first time I snooked around Mastodon (before Twitter exodus) for that matter. So I guess I'm inherently optimistic by the fact that where newer users might see little activity as a bad sign, I see a little activity as a huge improvement on what the status quo was not so long ago.

On a technical side, open source projects also tend not to benefit from growing too fast. It seems to me Fediverse platforms currently have a healthy activity level for the stage of completion they are in. Lemmy certainly grew faster than it could handle for a while, and arguably Mastodon suffered from the same.

The main reason I'm hopeful about the social web is, however, that it makes no sense any more to create a new platform that does not support it. No matter what kind of social networking site you're making, proprietary or open, you're going to want to make it ActivityPub enabled, simply because it gives you a user base right off the bat.

And furthermore, it encourages the development of new platforms, precisely because you don't need to establish yourself with a whole bunch of users. According to fedidb my platform of choice, PieFed, has 124 active users right now. It would not have been a very interesting corner of the old web.

I don't think the established user base here is going anywere, and I think future developments will feed into the ecosystem. So I'm pretty hopeful. But it is going to take time before all sorts of niche communities have made themselves a federated home.

Bluesky and Threads will fight it out over microblogging, while Mastodon will stick around as a smaller less corporate alternative. A year from now people on both platforms can probably follow my Mastodon handle anyway, so I don't really care all that much.

Not considering the costs of hosting infrastructure for downloads, developing Fediverse integration in software is an extremely complicated task, and retrofitting it into existing software is no joke.

A more realistic starting point is probably to follow them on Mastodon, ( @Retromags@mstdn.plus ) interacting with their posts and trying to spread them, and to try to build up a fediverse presence for them. Then eventually, if they find that they get the majority of their interactions through the fediverse, they might consider merging their comment sections.

I think alternative social media needs to be decentralized. There's just no other way it can be sustainable. Cohost was centralized - of course it couldn't stand a chance. Never mind all the other issues, which are obviously equally important.

For me, the fact that we are having this conversation on the social web is solid evidence pointing in the opposite direction of your concerns. I counted contributors from eight different websites and at least three different software platforms only in this comment section of twelve comments.

Alternative social media platforms have never looked so healthy!

I gave in to peer pressure and finally got Twitter right before shit completely hit the fan, even though I was already uncomfortable with it. I already had a Mastodon user, but not under my real name.

Then, during the exodus, I created a Mastodon user for academic use. This was a few months before defending my PhD in social sciences.

For a while, I was posting the same content on both platforms. On Twitter I am followed by a lot of people in my field, and many of them are still active. On Mastodon, there's like.. two active people specifically in my field.

Still, whenever I post anything both places, I have gotten more interactions on Mastodon than on Twitter. On Twitter a couple of people see it and boost, and they can be somewhat central in the field. But then it kind of deflates. On Mastodon, I get boosts from the ones there in the field, people in adjacent fields (for example the #rstats crowd), interested people from civil society, commentators, a real variety of people. Hell, the other day I was boosted by a folk singer I've been a fan of for years but that I didn't even know was on there.

Meanwhile, I occasionally check the temperature on Bluesky, and I bridge my posts there. Many in my field signed up while it was invite only. Some of them posted one or two posts back then. I haven't seen any actively since, and nobody from my field has followed my bridged account - but one R stats person has.

I guess they must be on Twitter still, if they are anywhere.

Anyway, point is, my field indeed failed to migrate. But I still achieve more by posting on Mastodon than on Twitter.

There seems to be another side to this story as well. I'm not quite invested enough to dig into it, but it might not be such an awful loss.

Then again, the Emacs server is not shutting down over costs. It's shutting down because the admin is tired of dealing with assholes on the internet.

Sure, you could pay people to do that as well, or maybe preferably, better tools need to be developed to ease the burden of individual instance admins. But this specific case is explicitly not about server costs.

"There's no such thing as free lunch" is a stupidity. There is. You have soup kitchens all over the world, the volunteers working for them do so because it gives them meaning, and they are often provided ingredients for free from supermarkets that would otherwise end in the trash.

It's a dumb metaphor that doesn't even work in the original example. There is more to life than capitalism.

That didn't mean nobody should pay. I make monthly donations to my Mastodon instance, and will probably branch out soon to support to other services I use as well. But everything is not always about money.

Yeah, I think you're right, and I think that's exactly why it's a blind spot for me.

On several occasions I've also lent an old laptop to friends when theirs broke, and all of them ended up using Linux for months no questions asked. They later went back to Windows because of the Word grammar check, but other than that it just worked for them.

But of course, if you can't get your drivers to work it'll be a completely different experience.

If you're ok Arch I guess it at least signals a willingness to learn! I would never dare to go there haha.

Yeah. I've double checked that my last few laptops worked well with Linux before buying them. But I don't buy very flashy technology, so it was never really any question.

My printer is from Brother, and it's just plug and play. At work it's all web print and has been since I started working for pay, really.

A test could be to start by using Libre software on Windows.

Switch to LibbreOffice or some other alternative instead of Word. Gimp, Inkscape, and Krita for graphical stuff. Whatever proprietary software you use, check if it exists for Linux; if not, see if you can find an alternative you're happy with.

For the people I know, Word is the biggest deal breaker.

Dumb user here. I completely disagree with this.

I was using Ubuntu for a few years, now I'm on Fedora. I don't really know how to do anything. For my needs it's just very easy.

Maybe my needs just aren't sophisticated enough for me to encounter all those problems I'm supposed to be having. But I've been using it for years and my experience is that it really just works.

I think Nostr might unironically be my favourite platform, simply because it keeps those toxic morons away from the fediverse.