Text for readability:
So far, Americans using RedNote have said they don’t care if China has access to their data. Viral videos on TikTok in recent days have shown Americans jokingly saying they will miss their personal “Chinese spy,” while others say they are purposefully giving RedNote access to their data in a show of protest against the wishes of the U.S. government.
“This also highlights the fact that people are thirsty for platforms that aren’t controlled by the same few oligarchs,” Quintin said. “People will happily jump to another platform even if it presents new, unknown risks.”
Lemmy doesn’t have the censorship and speech-control from those platforms, but it pretty much distributes your data widely to anybody that asks for it.
Hear me out: if you post stuff publicly, it is out there. The issue is data that shouldn’t be public getting public
This is it. A strong public domain benefits everyone. It is why open source software works.
AFAIU Lemmy sends your username, a user ID, and URI along with your message. That’s pretty innocuous.
It’s way less innocuous than you think.
But yeah, it’s only the stuff that you’d expect it to send. And only the stuff it needs to send. But the thing is, the valuable data those social networks gather is almost exactly that. They will invade your privacy and get everything they can, but the real value is on that and what you read. (What you read isn’t shared here.)
Content sure, but not where you are when you posted it and other meta data
On that note, I’d be shocked if one or more of the alphabet agencies haven’t developed a half-duplex version of the fediverse platforms purely for surveillance purposes. The openness of the ecosystem is really nice, but the default promiscuity of the protocols in question does have some specific and notable drawbacks.
It’s never really been about data collection. It’s about what service feeds users. The algorithm can be tweaked to provide slant towards particular ideals. It can sway elections. Some would rightly say that’s already done hard by western social apps. Yeah, and that’s wrong too. So they blame other countries for a smoke screen.
You forgot .ml
FWIW Pixelfed’s been growing like crazy the last couple days
Source: https://pixelfed.fediverse.observer/dailystats
edit: loops has a much smaller userbase but has also gained active users in the last couple days: https://loops.fediverse.observer/dailystats
Not the first on the app store, unfortunately…
I understand people arguing that a lot of advocacy work is on tiktok, hence it is important; but I really wish good people can advocate on good platforms, instead of monopolistic data-hungry tech oligarchs.
If you want more people to join the fediverse, you have to improve the user experience. People don’t want to read an article breaking down what the fediverse is, how to join an instance, how to find content, etc.
Streamline the join process so it doesn’t require learning the lore and technical training. Stop promoting the fediverse generally, and instead push people to easy to use frontends and popular instances. Remove the barriers to entry. If they want to dig deeper into different instances and the technical stuff, let them do that later. Stop loading the info dump at the front.
I agree that promoting the fediverse generally kind of doesn’t make sense. People join communities, not web protocols.
I wonder if we shouldn’t talk so much about “the fediverse” as we do about individual instances, because that’s what people actually join. They get the rest of the fediverse for free, but their home server will always be home. Just like with reddit back in the day, how I may not have identified much with the reddit overculture, I did love some of its communities.
Like look at the difference between the slrpnk communities, and the programming.dev communities. That’s something to be celebrated, like, come join this server - look at all the cool things we’re doing!
Fediverse and decentralism confused me initially but then I learned I can just sign up at lemmy.world and use it normally without having to know the backend.
You get it. Well said.
instead push people to easy to use frontends and popular instances.
I’ve seriously thought about starting up a website to do exactly this. The problem is I already have a mile long project list. Oh and I suck at UX lmao, backend and hosting/infrastructure stuffs that’s my jam. Putting together a nice UX with a good flow and then successfully promoting it…
Pixelfed’s app release seems like a good start.
A site goes to shit when everyone and their grandma hops on it. At the risk of sounding elitist, I would prefer to a part of the userbase that hasn’t been Eternal Septembered into the lowest common denominator.
All right then, keep your secrets. But then let’s promote a normie instance to Grandma so she doesn’t get brainwashed.
I dunno this kinda cracks me up a little because like…if you dig deep enough, were people flame-warring on usenet or BBS (wait lemme finish! Lol) over:
“Email needs way better UX and an insta-one-click-sign-up zero-thinking on-ramp so even a single-celled organism can figure it out!”?
That’s the easiest descriptor nowadays that explains the Fediverse. Email. “What if Twitter but as a generalized service that anybody could run, like email. Yahoo? Gmail? RobertLovesSurfing.net? They can all email each other but your account lives on one.”
A better way of seeking out an instance could be handy perhaps. I found Mastodon pretty smooth with “Hey you might like these if…!” Sort of suggestions. The openness of the platform should make this a much easier task than it might be otherwise, I think.
I also think better explaining the portability of your account data would help people see the benefit there.
I’d like more kinds of nerds to have an easier time getting on the Fediverse with us, so let’s improve that, but I also think we’re less popular BECAUSE the Fediverse is more about human communication much like “The Old Internet”, and less about desperate vapid fame-seeking and self-marketing and identity-as-brand, like Web2/3.0.
A lot of me thinks we’re here because corpo-net “disrupted” our forums and blogs away.
IMHO, the commercial-verse can keep its skibidis and hauk-tuas and *“Oh suddenly I’m famous! thanks for the gold kind stranger!”*s
I don’t think it’s cruel elitist “gatekeeping” to say the Fediverse is for anybody! But maybe not for Everybody. (Imagine if major brands discovered everybody moved to the Fediverse, for instance. Yikes.)
BTW it’s 2025 and plenty of people I’ve observed, here in the U.S, still complain that email is “too complicated.” (And no, they weren’t formerly from an uncontacted tribe or rescued from a sealed 1950’s fallout shelter.)
We could make things a bit easier to understand and smoother to experience, but trying to UX-away the requirement for a modicum of intelligence required is not a great end goal, I think.
Yeah this is more my take. The sign up process is already pretty smooth. Sure some of the theory or technicals might be complicated, but is a centralized platform that has secret algorithms to keep you engaged and push content, some of which may or may not be promoted invisibly you can’t always tell – is that really less complicated? /rq
Like if you type in “join lemmy” or “join mastodon” or hell even “join fediverse” in any search engine, the first result is a website briefly describing the concept and giving your some choices of servers to sign up at.
Lemmy’s Rookgaard. After 30 comments, you’re forced to register somewhere else.
That would just turn the fediverse into tiktok/facebook/whatever. The whole point is that you have to engage intentionally here, which prevents you from being served things that other people/countries/companies want you to see.
Its not hard to join here, but its not going to serve up the same experience so people leave. People also follow others, so there aren’t many people on those other platforms suggesting people join them in the fediverse.
I dont understand why anyone cares if the next big social media exodus off-ramp is to the fediverse or not. A huge influx of people that dont like this style of content and how its served to them isn’t going to make this better for those who do.
This is ridiculous gatekeeping.
The point of the fediverse is to get decentralized platforms not in the hands of corporate or government interests.
If you want a cliquey, niche space, then stay on an instance focused for that.