It’s still early. It’s not even federated yet, just more or less a 1:1 tiktok clone.

Jesus fucking Christ, you people are miserably pedantic. Nothing about my original post is wrong, so please kindly shut the fuck up with your “well achtually” takes.

Combo of terrible moderation rules changes by meta, the release of the pixelfed app on Android and iOS, and coverage of that app by major tech news outlets.

It’s the perfect combo of karma farming and “well, achtually” to make your blood boil. Good thing karma isn’t a thing on here from what I can tell.

The y axis starting zero does not change the fact that it’s exponentially growing right now. Filter that link posted below for 120 days and it is still a nearly straight vertical line of growth.

I don’t know about that app specifically, but I know some fediverse apps do not have all instances in their directory. For example, fedilab doesn’t have friendica.world. I would suggest hunting around for an app that supports your instance, but I agree, it is a dumb problem. What is the point of being able to join whatever instance you want if it is not listed on the app?

If the fediverse ever wants to scale, something like this has to come about. I personally think we need a whole lot of regional servers. For example, we make a cluster of servers by country, so lemmy.us, Lemmy.de, etc. Then, when those servers start to fill to a certain threshold (say 1000 users), we break them out regionally, so lemmy.ne.us, lemmy.se.us, etc. The way servers are assigned would be by selecting your country and region. It shouldn’t be too complex and would simplify the sign up people for a lot of people.

Not that these are the common denominator we should be catering to, but I think a lot of religious folks would get some negative connotations from that symbol, considering how much it looks like a pentagram.

I thought you were referring to the posting itself. I see what you mean about the emoji. It’s not some super high level of connection, but it is connection none the less. Someone I know gave me their thoughts. I may not have seen them or even talked to them directly in a number of years, but they still thought of me. That is meaningful, and if you can’t see that, then I guess I don’t know what to tell you. Feel free to minimize the experience all you want.

Sorry I don’t view social media as a second job that should require a whole lot of effort to engage in. What even is that take, for real?

I fully acknowledge that it is not universally good for everyone, and for those who do not find it good, there is plenty of other options out there. However, for the billions who use it daily to keep up with friends, it is good for them, and there are basically zero good alternatives. I agree that we should not invalidate others experiences. Just because something is not good for you does not mean it is not good for others.

Totally agree on the private company seeing everything you do and using it to train AI and monetize your data. That is why I am here after all. Wouldn’t it be better if we got as many people out of that system as possible, and into more democratically controlled systems?

How is it creepy to see what your friends post? I would also argue that you do have a middle man involved in any communication, even ones that are not on social media. Unless you are visiting them physically in person, you have some phone/internet providers mediating the communication. Social media is just another form of communication provider.

I would argue on the loneliness side of things, that having quit Facebook for a number of years, and then returned to it, I felt infinitely more isolated and lonely when I was off Facebook than when I was on it. Returning to it reconnected me with so many friends I had not talked to in forever, and I quickly realized how valuable social media is for social connection. It’s kind of sad that you view it as performative, because that is not how I view it at all. I now have a healthy social circle that is there for me if I am going through a hard time in my life, help me find a new place to live if I’m moving, etc, and who I can be there in a similar manner. That is real value that is a lot harder to maintain by texting people directly.

I just lost my cat. I made a post about it. Dozens of people who would have never heard about it otherwise reached out to me to comfort me. Sorry, but I don’t think I’m going to forget about how helpful that level of connection is.

It may be true that a large number of current users do not want to be publicly trackable. To be clear, I am not saying that all of the fediverse should be public personal profiles. However, the people on Facebook who want alternatives are going to be sorely disappointed. It’s not so much of meeting a goal as it is fulfilling a need. People want this, and it would be good for society if they had it. The infrastructure is here, it’s just a matter of building it.

On the second point, I’m in my late 30’s and have found a great deal of value with connecting with my friends and family. I was disconnected for a lot of years and it was extremely socially isolating. Reconnecting has been therapeutic for me, and it is one of the big reasons I will probably not be deleting my Facebook any time soon.

I mean, on the flip side, about 60% are under 44. I think 40-50 is the cutoff for being considered “old” these days. I say this as someone who is quickly approaching that first cutoff, lol.

That’s somewhat of a myth. 43% of Facebook users are under 34, and nearly 20% of them are under 24.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/187549/facebook-distribution-of-users-age-group-usa/

I’m gonna have to disagree. Today, I am able to keep up with the goings on of my friends and family on Facebook. This is not a ten years ago thing. Nowhere else on the web can I log in and see my friend from high school posting a funny meme, a colleague post a picture of his family, or my mom wishing my brother and his wife happy anniversary. You may not use it for that, but many people do, and I don’t know how you could call that a bad thing. Isn’t social connection what social media is all about? Why would we want to not accommodate that as much as possible?

I think an option on login for “personal account” vs “anonymous account” would be great. Personal accounts could require a phone number and allow import of contacts to help find personal accounts you know. There is a so much untapped potential here, we just need to make it a thing.

I suppose there’s two sides of the network effect. One side is how it works against a platform. In the case of the fediverse, it is working against it, for sure. The other side is how it helps a platform. For facebook, it helps. However, I would argue that these things are not immutable. Why did facebook develop a strong network effect? Because it provided a value that a lot of people saw, and encouraged them to sign up. It attracted users before it had a solidified network in place, because it built the infrastructure for the network effect to take place.

I do agree that open software is a relatively niche concept, but I think a lot of people these days can see very clearly how having one person own a whole platform and control the direction of it is a bad thing. Many of my more “normie” and less tech minded friends are talking about finding alternatives. I wish I had a place to direct them that provided the social networking functions of facebook, but it just is simply not a thing at this time. Even if there was not many people they know on there, as they join, we could find each other. We would do it as a group, as many of them are currently doing for bluesky. However, I am not recommending friendica yet because it is still not quite there.

As for the private posting functionality, I see no options to enable that, if it exists. I think there is a lot of work that needs to be done on the UI and tutorials side to enable and instruct users on how to fully utilize the site.