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  • Don't know where I read it, but I also like this metaphorical comparison:

    Traditional social media is like a shop, except the customers are advertisers and you, as a user sit on the shelves, waiting to be bought. It's made entirely for revenue and profit, everything else is secondary. The shop will gladly show you an advertiser that pays for your attention before showing you your parent's vacation photos or the important post from that group you follow.

    A fediverse instance is like a community garden. Nobody is a product and nobody is buying anything for themselves. Instead, everyone grows the garden together. Some people took initiative and responsibility with running the garden (admins/mods) and others joined and shared the garden with them and supported the garden with funds and content.

    In the fediverse garden, there is no other point than talking amongst each other and the garden is connected to other gardens that work mostly with the same principles and the gardens "cross-polinate" each other with discussions and content and through that help each other grow even more.

  • "You mean it just exists so people can share shitposts and memes? No engagement goals to please advertisers and shareholders?"

  • I think a federation of smaller hobby run sites is going to be the only way to avoid the commercialised Internet, and all the negatives it involves.

    • that is how the internet started initially

      • Yep. I was around in the mid 90's. Which was around when it became generally affordable to get internet at home.

        I'd say most stuff was running from university computers though. Normal people couldn't afford to have a permanent connection (even 64k) at home and in the few places co-location existed it was priced out of reach of normal people (and so were the servers you could install).

        But it was still not even slightly commercialised.

  • I just need a place to shitpost for stress relief, I get drawn into deeper discussions but my main goal is to be as thoughtless and as dumb as possible Wheeeeeeeee

  • You might however be watching ads. And probably not realize it.
    (Although, to be fair, right now we're probably much too small for anyone to bother doing much astroturfing)

    • Even if there was astroturfing, I wouldn't say that counters OP's arguments any more than it would if some guy came in and started handing out coupons to a pizza place in the local public library.

  • Wrong. You are expected to give me 10% of your wages via carrier pigeon or face consequences.

  • I agree. Same as public libraries, someone pays for it, either through work or through money. So people should always donate to their instance if they are able to. Otherwise they are actively promoting the opposite: closed source, for profit, walled gardens.

89 comments