John Oliver promoted alternatives to big tech in last night's episode, including Mastodon and Pixelfed

I say give it three years and blue sky will just be a neolib twitter
- Anybody who supports the definition of liberalism is an ally, imo.
  
  Yeah, infighting in the resistance is a waste of time.

I feel like the DNC are being pushed into a blindspot for the general public.
All Bernie has done is go around to speak at different events, and he is far from the only politician to do so.

Not friendica, which seems an obvious facebook alternative.
Also, I think they're onto something with their fuck it approach that every social media platform would benefit from. The internet was mostly that before. Content moderation primarily serves advertisers, it was never really for the people. Old internet anarchy was chaotic fun.
- Content moderation primarily serves advertisers
  I'm lost, here. Do you not think fighting toxicity and hate speech is a valid and important function of moderation that's just as much or more for the sake of the people as it might be for advertisers?
- The Internet was never supposed to have a central authority beyond the DNS tables.
  
  Imagine traveling down a liminal space of tubes and the only signs are nondescript TLDs.

Can anyone explain Bluesky vs Mastodon as Twitter alternatives, asking as someone who never really used Twitter much anyway?
- On the surface, both of them look very similar in format. They also both advertise themselves as decentralized and different from traditional social media, arguing that they won't face the same problems old social media did.
  Mastodon uses ActivityPub, which is the widely used standard that most other fediverse platforms use. Mastodon is properly decentralized, where all the servers can interact and operate independently.
  BlueSky made their own protocol that they control, citing that ActivityPub wasn't enough for what they wanted to do, and in some ways that's true. However with their structure, a central relay is needed in order for different instances to interact and so people argue that it isn't truly decentralized. Right now BlueSky is either the only instance, or basically the only instance. They've mentioned that they could transfer control of the relay to some other organization, but past that I don't think they've taken any steps towards that.
  BlueSky is also a VC backed company while Mastodon is now under a nonprofit. BlueSky has its roots in crypto tech. There is more technical discussion on if it's even possible to have a decentralized BlueSky and if it's all just talk while they gather users.
  My personal opinion is that I really hope bluesky does what they're promising, but I'm not expecting them to be any different than Twitter once they get a critical mass of users and the investors demand profits / infinite growth.
  
  Bluesky is what happens when someone with a corporate mindset wants to make something new and good. Mastodon happens when hobbyists get together and make something. Ive heard BlueSky has a board of people in charge to make sure it doesn't end up like twitter. Exactly what one would expect a company to do. Make sure something doesnt go wrong? Put a few people in charge. Mastodon just has the whole community. I may be wrong here as I dont use either. Right now Im just wondering what will happen when BlueSkys provider comes knocking with the hosting bill. As mass social media migrations are rare, its just a shame people are leaving twitter for another big tech site instead of something more community grown.
  
  from what i understand, a decentralized bluesky is nothing for an enduser at all.
  TL;DR: the cost for an enduser to run a bluesky instance will soon be prohibitive because of the amount of storage needed owed to its shared heap architecture. but what it does is to provide a "credible exit" - if users lose trust or the company shutters, there's nothing in the way of another organisation picking up the mantle and continue from there on.

Not Lemmy though. Based.
- Yeah I think it's best we don't advertise this place. It's a little strange.
  
  Come to Lemmy, we got: blood thirsty Linux users, furries, femboys, communists, and tankies. Also, porn.
  
  We need to get more people in here if we want it to actually be a Reddit competitor. Right now it’s good for some communities, but smaller ones are still extremely underpopulated.
  
  It's no different than reddit, DIGG, or the Something Awful forums before they got popular.
  
  It's good to have some friends, but don't let too many normies in.....

I wish he had mentioned Lemmy, but it's understandable that he didn't. Also Bluesky isn't an alternative to big tech, it IS big tech. I wish it wasn't stealing so much of our publicity lately.
But beggars can't be choosers, and we have seen some nice growth over the past couple months. John Oliver fans are the perfect candidates to join the fediverse, hopefully some of them find their way to Lemmy.
- John Oliver being uploaded to YouTube is awesome! I should comment that Lemmy is a great Reddit alternative
- Exactly, don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Someone using BlueSky over Twitter is a good thing.
- Indirectly, looking up "John Oliver Mastodon" brings up this post in the top few. "John Oliver Pixelfed" has this post as the first option
  So we're not completely left out :)
- John Oliver fans are the perfect candidates to join the fediverse, hopefully some of them find their way to Lemmy.
  Too late - we are already here!:-P
  
  How can anyone not love the guy?
- Also Bluesky isn't an alternative to big tech, it IS big tech. I wish it wasn't stealing so much of our publicity lately.
  This; I'm so sick of hearing it pop up when people mention alternatives.
  
  I'm not sure anyone mentions bluesky as an alternative to big tech.
  Pretty sure they only mention it as an alternative to musk/X.
  
  The thing that it really has going for itself is that it simply isn't twitter. And Muskler made sure that's a huge deal.
- I'm really not happy about bluesky their fragmentation of the fediverse protocols is only going to harm us in the long run.
  
  Intentionally, I think.
  
  I’m really not happy about bluesky their fragmentation of the fediverse protocols
  shrug, I wish they were with us, but they are also a big ole corporate entity, so I'm kind ok with us staying our our side of the fence. As they need to implement payment and corporate protections to their network, we're free to be free over here.
  is only going to harm us in the long run.
  We don't have to play ball. not with them anyway,
  I think, If we have any credible threat, it's going to be from the Governmental gross anti-tampering laws, forced moderation, or backup regulations. They could make it legally difficulty for us to exist.
  
  Bluesky was always twitters goal, they were losing hella money, so they devloped blue sky.
- Agreed, but at least Bluesky is a public benefit corporation, so it supposed to take in the needs of society as well as profit in its decision-making. That may not be much, but it's a start.
  
  "Public benefit corporation" is a meaningless designation. All it means is they have the option of putting their mission over their shareholders, not that they are obligated to do so.
  
  I'm not familiar with the details of that, but it seems like more of a red herring to me. A form of controlled opposition to divert people away from truly revolutionary platforms.
  Of course it has to seem like a plausible alternative, but is it actually decentralized or altruistic enough to make a meaningful difference? I think not.
  
  Chances are it's really just that, a start. See OpenAI.
  
  If I was losing money and wanted to mantain control over the public id become a public benefit corp too
  
  So twitter didn't make money anyways, this is a better way for them to hold power
- I agree, but I also think we should remember a loss for musk is a win for society
- Do you really think Lemmy could handle the amount of people that Reddit has?
  As far as I know the existing instances are usually running on capacity and always in need of donations, and that’s when the owner isn’t handling the costs themselves. I’m not sure how well most instances have right now.
  Maybe Lemmy would benefit of some way to get people to pay, such as purchasing the ability to give people awards etc. like Reddit. Despite being useless stuff, it might provide some fun that would make hardcore users want to pay. But for that to work out, all apps would also need to show the posts awarded in a different way, so I think that’s unlikely.
  But the point is that without a business model, the Fediverse will only be able to handle a limited number of enthusiasts before it faces scaling problems.
  
  LW definitely can't handle more traffic than it already has. It already (thanks to the admins' refusal to update to the latest version of Lemmy, which fixes this issue) takes multiple days for LW content to get federated to other instances properly, which is why I've had to switch over to this alt account of mine because there are zero comments on this post in my main instance. With more users, that delay would grow from days to potentially weeks.
  
  Do you really think Lemmy could handle the amount of people that Reddit has?
  yup. no question. Not one instance mind you, but Reddit is also a giant cluster. (and clusterfuck)
  As far as I know the existing instances are usually running on capacity and always in need of donations,
  We just need the big bois to stop stuffing themselves. There's 0 reason to have 2/3 of the totally traffic flooding into world because people are scared of Federation that they never even have to deal with.
  Maybe Lemmy would benefit of some way to get people to pay, such as purchasing the ability to give people awards etc.
  Maybe we make some premium pay servers with baller architecture, killer response time, user capacity limits and high speed storage?
  But the point is that without a business model, the Fediverse will only be able to handle a limited number of enthusiasts before it faces scaling problems.
  Eventually, it's going to be ads, donations or payments. It's all someone else's computer, someone has to foot the bill. But at great scale, you should be able to have an ad-free experience for something in the range a dollar or two a month.

Mom we are on the TV!

I’m sure he’s going to be facing lawsuits from Краснов and Wormtongue any day now.
- I don't get it
  
  Dipshit in chief and his butthurt-prone sidekick will probably sue.

Are we that degenerate already??
- YES! #winning

Does that ~~Late Show~~ Last Week Tonight with John Oliver have a presence in the Fediverse?
- You mean Last Week Tonight? The Late Show is Colbert.
  
  I do 🥺
- Someone on mastodon told me, if you haven't found someone on fedi, you are probably not looking hard enough. But no, I don't think they are on fedi
  
  Someone is wrong lol. NFL, for example, cannot do anything outside of Twitter at this time. They are apparently working on it, but it's gotta be implemented league-wide, so it's taking some time. Idk if they're even trying to get onto Mastodon, last I heard it was just Bluesky.
  This is a large org with hundreds of millions of fans, with no presence on Fediverse really. I'm sure there are mirror accounts, but none are official.
- https://lemmy.world/post/25998432
- Good question. Would love that!

Cool, everybody can build these companies up so that they can launch their IPOs and be controlled by a new board of directors fresh from wall street. It will all be so different.
- Not commenting on Bluesky, but the others have taken steps to differentiate themselves
  Mastodon was handed over to a non profit
  https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/13/24342603/mastodon-non-profit-ownership-ceo-eugen-rochko
  Signal has been under a nonprofit
  https://signalfoundation.org/
  Being open source also means that people can fork the apps if something changes, or apps + server code in the case of a lot of fediverse software
- The whole point of federation is that that can't really happen, or at least they can fuck a single server, but not the whole ecosystem.

It's crazy how the wind changed. Does anyone remeber the almost exact same thing 4 years ago, when people on the right side of political spectrum shared alternatives to big tech from their point ov view? GAB.COM, PARLER, BRAVE, DUCKDUCKGO etc
XD
- Duckduckgo? That's just a search engine, no?
  I agree on the rest of the parts tho
  
  Yeah, odd inclusion. Duckduckgo is indeed a search enginge, but it's essentially just a front end for Bing.
  
  DDG and Brave were pushed as "censorship free" alternatives, back when I was looking into covid disinformation, because the very obviously fake websites would sometimes rank higher on them
  There may be more to it though
  
  I mean yeah, doesnt matter. The point is people shared alternatives to big tech just like folks who are not in the power right now. Cause apparently x is musk's and it looks like the consensus is that rest of big tech is siding with Trump for profit
- In both cases it was primarily performative for Americans but this time there will be considerable chunk of Europeans who will be looking to leave big tech for services in non-hostile countries.
- How is Brave right wing? Because of cryptocurrencies?
  
  Brave's business model is a crypto scam wrapped in a protection racket. It man-in-the-middles the site's ads, replacing them with Brave's own, then holds the revenue hostage unless the site gives legitimacy to Brave's crypto by accepting it as payment.
  For comparison, "normal" ad-blocking consists of an end-user exercising his property right to control the operation of his own computer by programming it not to display the ads at all.
  Hopefully you can see how the thing Brave does is very different, and much more ethically fraught.
  
  It’s not explicitly rightwing.
  A couple years ago Musk was recommending Signal.
  It’s just an example of right wing people recommending alternatives.

This is fantastic to see.

someone tell that n00b that Bluesky is not an alternative
- It is to twitter.
- It's fun for now until the state gets a hold of it. They'll be over here sooner or later, just let them trickle in and get everyone used to it.
  
  True. For now I'm happy to just see Twitter lose.

So thats why it was slow for a while.

Would like to get my family on Signal. I deleted my facebook account and now we use various other chat apps that I don't quite like
- I've never understood why people just can't send messages through text. Like why do they need a special app in order to do it.
  I don't use Facebook myself and my family members just started texting me and honestly it's so much easier
  Don't get me wrong, I definitely think that signal is more secure. I just don't understand why people just install another app in order to communicate with their family, just let them know you're available through text
  edit: I want to clarify that I may not have been clear/missed saying in this post, I'm not saying people shouldn't(if people would change I would love it), I'm saying I don't understand why people do knowing that your family members aren't going to care and are just going to text you anyway as has been my experience
  
  SMS is incredibly antiquated as soon as you want to do anything multimedia, or heck sending an SMS longer than 144 characters.
  My mother received a video over SMS the other day and it legitimately looked like it was filmed on a Nokia 6310.
  I've encouraged my family to use Signal to replace SMS and it functions really well as an SMS upgrade. It's more secure, private, supports sending decent quality multimedia, the interface is simplistic, it has formatting, does video calls well, and you can send a long message without it being a hacked together string of 5 messages.
  From both a security and usability perspective, it wins out on SMS in my opinion.
  Edit: there's also the nightmare of group chats with SMS. I hate when extended family try to use it
  
  i imagine its because text messages are saved by your provider and can be used or accessed by law enforcement even if deleted. but that may or may not be an issue for most people swapping recipes or talking to their family about normal every day stuff.
  
  Maybe you want to communicate through an encrypted service?

Senpai noticed me!!

One of the few decent TV hosts. His reporting on Palestine breaks with the anti-Palestinian censorship that dominates US media.

Would be nice if he promoted more fediverse platforms like Mbin :) Missed opportunity.
- I guess they weren't picked as they don't have official apps. Most people look for those first.
  
  Interstellar is the official Mbin app: https://joinmbin.org/apps
  
  I don't understand the point of installing a web browser that only runs one website.

Anyone have a link that works for Canadians, you MONSTERS?
- https://peertube2.cpy.re/w/rq6WfwnQTiHfpoWhURLNBS
  
  Thanks!
- Is the video seriously region blocked in Canada, but not in Russia?
  
  I may be wrong, but I think it's because some company owns the rights to the show in Canada and doesn't want people watching it on YouTube
  
  Indeed it is, that is such a weird block
- https://files.catbox.moe/avnl0j.mp4
  https://peertube2.cpy.re/w/rq6WfwnQTiHfpoWhURLNBS?start=25m14s
- You have to use a VPN.
  
  I just got it on the dl instead
- 🇺🇸❤️🇨🇦

I'm going to assume this was Daniel O'Brien's doing... because he's the only Last Week writer I know specifically.

Awesome!

~~Is that mpv 👀~~

I've been off Twitter for over almost two years now, on to Federated Mastodon and Mbin, and while I've often spoke against BlueSky, having been founded by Jack, after Jack let Twitter become infested with Nazis for engagement, then sold it to Elon Musk who he knew was going to kill it, when the world started to come to an end two weeks ago, I needed to be plugged in, so signed up for a BlueSky account. There's simply not enough communication happening on Mastodon, not enough people, not discussing the things I'm interested in.
The Fediverse is also a sewer of both overt and covert Antisemitism, where any pro Jewish or pro Israel content is mysteriously "moderated" by antisemites under the guise of political progressivism, which makes it so much less attractive.
So I swallowed my hatred of Jack, and have been "skeeting" on BlueSky just as I did Twitter for all those years, blocking out the Jew hate there (it is legion), and realizing in the end, that's more important to me, connection to live events and discussion as they're happening to get the best collective overview of any given event
- Having seen many of your comments across lemmy, I feel like you equate a lot of criticism of the state of Israel’s policies and actions with antisemitism. I acknowledge people who hate Jews exist and are definitely on the internet, but I find knee jerk accusations of antisemitism to be intellectually lazy.
  
  seriously - too many people see criticism of Israel's government and read it as condemnation of all Jews. As if it's the case that that government represents all Jewish people worldwide (or even all Jewish people in Israel...!)
  It's like people are thinking that wanting Israel to stop its genocide also means there should be another genocide targeting Jews?? Nuance beyond that sort of black-and-white polarized viewpoint seems to be increasingly dead.
- I see a lot of anti Zionist stuff here. but nothing anti Semitic.
  just my 2c.
  
  Yup. I'm always wary of people lumping anti zionism, anti Israel government, and anti semitism all in the same bag.
- Oh come on, it's not like you're any better yourself. I've seen your comments around lemmy, and most were racist towards arabs.
  what genocide? arabs attack, rape, and murder, then esconce the terrorists directly in and between civilian populations for the sole reason so that when israel responds the body count can be escalated and used as public relations. genocide. shame on you.
  I don't recall doing any of that.
  Anti zionism =/= anti semitism.
- Jack isn't involved with BlueSky anymore. He left the board when they told him to fuck off with his push to get rid of moderation.
  I've got nothing to add to the other replies on your mischaracterization of antio-Zionist as anti-Semitism.
  
  Jack is still the single largest shareholder of private Bluesky stock (beacause he founded it and never ceded his controlling percentage to anyone) "The Foundation" controls a certain amount, Jack controls the rest, surprise, the "leaving BlueSky" was his agreed stepping away from the board, dude didn't give up his stock, lol. If anyone tells you Jack isn't involved with BlueSky any more, you should really block them for either being willfully ignorant, or purposefully mistrustful.
- The Fediverse is also a sewer of both overt and covert Antisemitism
  Is this a problem unique to the Fediverse, or is this a case that it's more rampant here? Or does it only seem like it?
  My feeds are fairly well curated, or perhaps you might say "blinkered", so I don't see a lot of it. Or maybe I don't see what's right in front of me, which is why I ask, since you definitely see it better than I can.
  (This is not an attempt at a bad faith argument; I'm firmly anti-anti-Semitism, and I'm not saying it's not there. Frankly, I'd be surprised if there wasn't any. Anywhere there's people, their prejudices generally follow.)
  
  "Lemmy" seems to have be started, and disseminated, by the Hard European Tankie Left, who Administer and Moderate most of it's instances, and what seems to inform the ongoing moderation of any Pro Israel or Pro Jewish voice that has the temerity to defend itself. Lemmy Kilmister owned the largest personal collection of Nazi memorabilia in the world for years up until his death, and just like every other monster you've ever heard of who made that particular obsession the centerpiece of their interest, it probably should have factored in when naming a social media 'verse after. I fully expect all my comments on this to be mysteriously "moderated" as well.
- Nice try Jacob
- I'm Jewish myself and I completely agree with you.. Sadly it exists on a pretty much every social media, but BlueSky has a unique feature called sharable block lists/mute lists, I believe they call it "stacked moderation", I've subscribed to a few of those and it has blocked 90% of antisemites/terrorism sympathisers, I kinda wish some Fedi platform would have a similar feature as well