Great article. When I came to lemmy/kbin a few weeks ago (I’m an old time now, right), I thought it will become great when most of those on Reddit realize that this is the place to be and come here in droves. That would be greatness. After reading this and thinking about it, I’m fine with the way it is now. There are lots of interesting posts like this one and interesting feedback to them. If anything having several million members in this community would make it worse.
I define success of a social network proportional to the level of fun in having there. So far Mastodon and Lemmy are the most successful for me.
I guess the first thing all people needed to do is self-hosting (Yunohost, Nextbox, or the like), and the second thing is paying for Open Source software they use (if they can pay, as digital communication should be free very much like the commons -fresh air, drinking water- but those who can should pay imo.)
Self-hosting is probably more affordable to do when ran out of your own home. I run my lemmy and mastodon servers out of my home on 16GB of RAM and 300MB of storage space. This would cost a small fortune to pay a cloud hosting provider for.
Self hosted at home really depends on what sort of Internet you can even get. You might be metered, you might only have a couple mbps upstream, it probably is against TOS.
It’s definitely against the ToS for me ISP. I doubt they’ll ever really find out because the bandwidth I’m using isn’t as crazy as the other customers which regularly stream from Netflix, Hulu, etc. I can kind of hide in plain sight. Also, my internet connection is fiber to the home. I have the lowest tier of service at 300MiB up and down. So I guess I realize I’m coming from a situation of relative privilege. I wish most people had this capability.
I think of money as one form of contribution. People should contribute more instead of simply asking from a place of entitlement.
I agree there are many forms of contribution (e.g., writing code if you’re a developer), it must not necessarily be money, but am not sure whether I understand what you mean.
Seems a bit disingenuous to compare the niche of tech folks that used Google+ to the niche that use WeChat, with the later “niche” being… China…
Not everyone has to agree that dominating a country’s social media usage is a good goal, but it clearly is the goal for many companies, and they’re going to continue to persue it. Perhaps users of social media should redefine success, but for creators of social media platforms there are absolutely clearly defined measures of success and failure.
Why was it linking to web archive instead of the source?
Future-dystopian-proofing
Let’s just hope archive.org doesn’t itself go down.
Agree with a lot there.
Actually, it feels like at this point there should be at least a couple social media platforms operated as utility services, not as for-profit organisations specializing in selling user data and/or providing access to users’ beliefs and worldviews to the highest bidder.
As much as people might not like it, SM services seem to only grow in relation to importance for a healthy well-functioning society, and reclassifying at least something as a public utility/human right/something in that vein is long overdue imo.
Not sure if it’s even possible though in current enterprise/governmental structures :(
Btw, that’s partly why I’m trying to participate a lot more here than I ever did on Reddit. I know fediverse probably isn’t going to be the next big thing, but if we can build some sizeable foundation here it’s at least worth trying. I’m sure as shit that large companies won’t even try.
