Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy
The TikTok ban and Donald Trump's rise to power show how fragile our social media accounts are. We must normalize and invest in decentralized social media.
The thing about Mastodon for influencers is... you don't even have to leave Twitter. Just post to both.
If enough people get into that habit, it makes the transition much easier for everyone.
Twitter is very friendly to influencers because it automatically boosts popular posts and hashtags. Mastodon doesn't by design, so they're gonna have a much, much harder time there.
That's an okay decision to take, but it makes it hard to grow the network because there's a lower financial incentive.
Mastodon doesn't by design, so they're gonna have a much, much harder time there.
In theory, yes. But what early switching folks are reporting is that the total impressions are much lower on Mastodon, but the total engagement is much higher, for the same effort.
Which is confusing unless we factor in what we know about Twitter farming bot account on purpose to create an inflated appearance of success.
Of course, there's still the matter of Twitter genuinely has orders of magnitude more users. So as an either/or proposition, no way does it, yet, make sense to ditch Twitter for Mastodon.
But for the value-to-reach ratio, with the same effort applied to both, anyway, Mastodon is actually already a better value than Twitter.
All that to say, yeah, Twitter is better, purely due to the user base, and Mastodon's algorithm actually treats creators better. Which we kind of already knew, as it was created by people fed up with Twitters abusive algorithms.
Please tell me how I can keep posting to twitter after I was banned for being a journalist?
My point was for people who are scared to leave Twitter. They don't have to. They can just dip their toes in while still holding their Elon-themed blanket.
I understand that often you can't just drop the platform where all the engagement is when your job is to promote something. However, you can still enable people who do want to make the switch.
What's happening right now is eerily close to the "Gleichschaltung" that happened after Hitler took over Germany, basically bringing all media in line with the will of the party and the leader. It was news media then, it is social media now. Because for many people, social media is their primary news source.
Will smaller alternatives be enough to upend their plans?
The smaller alternatives will get bigger as the mainstream social media gets worse and worse. The job for us, in whatever way we can, is to build the alternatives and make them ready to handle the influx, and make them welcoming to new people.
It blows my mind that places like the transit systems that were on Twitter haven't migrated over to their own Mastodon server. They're not that hard to set up, and there's so little risk when you just don't accept public signups on your domain.
I agree. The Fediverse stuff is really well suited for governments and businesses. They can be in complete control of their instance, post whatever information they want distributed, and they don't need to rely on any other business for it.
From talking to someone involved in local government software, it seemed to me like there is a push in the opposite direction from that; they want and are moving towards offloading as much as possible to third party software vendors.
Completely agree! Seeing the dumb little logos all over timetables and the sides of buses always makes me roll my eyes. First they had to change the "t" logo to the bird, then that's out of date on a billionaire's whim and they have to replace it with the apocalyptic "X". Come on guys, this is getting embarrassing. Stop treating big private companies like Daddy, it's time to stand on your own feet. The tools are there.
Checked the rules and I think this is allowed? But if you've still got reddit and don't mind being a fediverse evangelist please go hit this thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1i6rp3o/decentralized_social_media_is_the_only/
Especially for Redditors, Lemmy is such a no-brainer alternative. I think I'm gonna try to do more, and try to bring some of my audio communities out here by promoting Lemmy in the subs.
Look at this for inspiration: https://pixelfed.fediverse.observer/dailystats
Someday it will happen for Lemmy again.
lmao clicked that link and one of the first comments I see is “reddit is pretty decentralized”
I get that 404 needs to make money but this article could greatly benefit from not being paywalled. Or at least list a definition of what decentralized social media is with some actual recommendations before the paywall because people clearly have no fucking clue
I now have a dozen comments on Reddit in the last year, up from 3 an hour ago.
Its all good!
Go and sprinkle the simplest keywords in the thread - Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed - and tell them your experience.
Add links as well, Lemmy onboarding can be very clunky: https://lemmy.world/post/24220536
Something like
"Lemmy has 42k monthly active users
Feel free if you have any questions"
I thought they're removing posts with links.
How much of the fediverse runs on AWS and how willing do we think besos would be to pull the plug on those?
Doing my part running my instances locally 🫡
Lemmy.ca will be moved on a fat server in Vancouver colo. Currently on cheap hardware in OVH. Not sure about .world. Probably similar. AWS is expensive. So Bezos would have to have Trump annex Canada before he'd be able to put his fingers on us.
.world and a majority of the fediverse uses Hetzner afaik.
EDIT: According to Fedidb Hetzner is the most common ASN (excluding Cloudflare).
They don't control the domain registrar's at least. Yet. (Or at least not de jure)
Don’t they have their own DNS? It’s called Route 53 I think?
Though I don’t think you are required to use it with your AWS hosts. But that’s not exactly what I meant by pulling the plug. They could quite literally pull the plug on your service. (Disconnect you from switches/routers, power off your hosts, etc.)
Not much, probably. For small scale usecase, like a VPS, AWS is horrifically expensive. For a 4GB of ram VPS, AWS is 30 USD a month, whereas you can get that for 10 USD a month, elsewhere.
AWS does this because of vender lock in. For the few times when a consumer of theirs needs a VPS (or some other service cheaper elsewhere, it's less effortt to continue to use AWS than to go someplace else.
But for individuals and small organizations, like the fediverse servers, we can just start out on the cheaper options.
Archive link: http://archive.today/ztU6A
Can someone please post the full article in the comments?
@spaduf@slrpnk.net idk if you saw my post about this in https://programming.dev/post/24371441
Social media is a cancer on society.
Uh, no? We can't organize if we lock up our information.
We need both. Public bullhorns and confidential communications.
that's what we want, yeah, but it won't help us connect with the people we need to dislodge from the death cult.
There is some discussion of that idea here:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/#praxis
