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Comment by weknowbetter | Hacker News Reader

I'm literally begging people to start using the Fediverse at this point.

It doesn't have what people want (an audience)

And we replace one tyrant for dozens. It's not much of an improvement.

I don't know much about the Fediverse, but if you can easily move your account or data from one tyrant to another (and it looks like you can) then that is a huge improvement.

You can even become your own tyrant

What the big social networks provide is the ability to transact money. No distributed non-corporation system can ever provide the money flows that make people use corporate social networks. Or, they can, but the instant they do they're legally attacked and destroyed. So no independent/distributed network can ever really draw those people who make up the majority who are chasing money or following those who chase money. The audience won't exist.

No-one cares, peoples family and friends are not on the Fediverse.

My realization that it was cooked was when I was doing my comp sci PhD where everyone in our group fully understood the implications of data, dependency, ads, surveillance capitalism but 3 out of 20 agreed to download Signal instead of WhatsApp/Messenger.

You are asking for too much sadly.

I agree with you but I also understand your peer group.

WhatsApp solves so many communication problems. It's a single protocol that can do text, audio and video calling. It works on low- and high-bandwidth connections. Everybody already has it, so it's functionally as ubiquitous as the phone itself.

Signal also has the "it's another app" problem. WhatsApp didn't have this problem initially because it was cheaper than texting in its heyday. Thus, having it on your phone made a lot of sense. Now that texting and video calling are functionally free and WhatsApp is ubiquitous, getting people onto something else is much more of an investment.

iMessage + FaceTime will be the next big platform if Apple decides to make it work across the pond. It has everything WhatsApp has while being disassociated from Meta.

the learning curve to understanding the fediverse is too high for most people. They just want to log in, have everything in one place, and not care how it got there.

Fediverse is fine, are there any other platforms that work around such censorship?

The fediverse sucks and only people in their small tech bubbles don't seem to realize that the vast majority of people do not know or care about things like "federated social media".

We just need someone* to create a "WoW Classic" version of a social network so that we can get back on it and this time try to make it work. Social media is one of the worst things that has happened to humanity since the web was created. But it used to be good. So it's incomprehensible to me why no one has made a social networking site matching old facebook and without the awfulness added later.

* Maybe some of us can do it, send me a message.

We need the kind of populace that will care about - and demand - federated communications immune to censorship. Until then, we're entitled only to continue consuming garbage.

It's fine if people don't care about the federated aspect but I don't think we can rely on a corporation to solve this problem. Even a small one. Federation solves a real technical problem whether end users care or not.

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