TLDR - What you can do to make your computing more European
TLDR - What you can do to make your computing more European
Too long, didn't read - Better Tech
This is my website. It is not commercial.
TLDR - What you can do to make your computing more European
Too long, didn't read - Better Tech
This is my website. It is not commercial.
I don't really like naming specific instances (lemmy.world, mastodon.social) and distro (Ubuntu) instead of at least offering a few choices + a full list of instances.
Many people don't want to get into the topic that much, they wan't it accessable and easy to use. That's also the reason that many Big Tech firms can bring out products to get your data and sell it because those products are easy to use. If we want people to join our alternatives then we should make them accessable and not judge them for their disinterest in the details.
That is exactly why I made this page. If you want more details you can follow the links and dive into things, but if you don't then the options on this page are much better than doing nothing.
I'd prefer terms like 'Switch from Reddit to Lemmy by joining https://lemmy.world/ or another instances which you might like, see join-lemmy.org for a list.'
Full disclosure, I upvoted and agree with you.
Still, this leaves open the question of how you reached your idea of sensible defaults. Are these just the most popular in each category (e.g. most successful search engine, highest user-count Lemmy instance, etc.)?
I strongly disagree with putting Ubuntu front and center. I realize that Canonical is headquartered in the UK (although with many subsidiaries including ones in the US, Canada, and China), is one of the most corporate-controlled "community" distributions. Even if something is European, other points of criticism should not be forsaken.
Agree with this, but in a tldr there shouldn't have a lot of disclaimers at the same time. Maybe just adding words like 'for example' or 'such as' or 'a popular choice is' can already say enough.
Agreed, I'd take OpenSUSE over an Ubuntu flavour any day if european is important. Generally I roll Debian servers and a Fedora desktop though.
Like others have mentioned, those of us in the know probably don't need much help picking alternatives here, as we're likely to know what the options are and how they differ. For the regular Jane and Joe to even stand a chance in a pretty confusing landscape it needs to be as simple as possible to get going with an alternative, or else I fear most people will just fall back on the well known, well marketed options.
I suggested to a non-techy coworker (a Reddit user) he'd give Lemmy a shot, and when I asked him how it went a couple of days later he said he got confused during the sign up process, "what the heck is an instance, which one should I pick?".