Fediverse alternative to Facebook is what's really missing

Submitted ⁨⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works⁩ to ⁨fediverse@lemmy.world⁩

I do a presentation of the Fediverse to my college student and will soon be giving short workshops to organization as well. I realize that a viable, decentralized altenative to Facebook is IMO the biggest missing piece of the puzzle. We need something that offers some kind of central platform for networking, events, groups, etc. For work related stuff I present Nexcloud, Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed and Loops are getting really interesting. I believe if we could get a massive movement of people to adopt an FOSS alternative to Facebook, everything else would easily follow. What do you people think, what would you recommend? I haven’t tried Friendica yet.

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thepompe@ttrpg.network ⁨26⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
No it’s not.

It’s called Friendica.

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skisnow@lemmy.ca ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
One huge problem is that most people on Facebook neither know nor care what sinister things Meta are doing to them. Everyone thinks they’re immune to propaganda, and most people don’t understand the true extent with which they’re being tracked or what’s being done with that data.

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- HarkMahlberg@kbin.earth ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  The flip side of that same coin is that, IME, fediverse developers champion data privacy, anonymity, and decentralization. Users should never offer that much personal data to one platform, so they build and advocate for platforms that don't require that data. Building a lowercase-f facebook on the fediverse would betray that foundation.
  
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artyom@piefed.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

I realize that a viable, decentralized altenative to Facebook is IMO the biggest missing piece of the puzzle.

We already have it. It’s called Friendica.

We need something that offers some kind of central platform for networking

Central platforms bad.

I believe if we could get a massive movement of people to adopt an FOSS alternative to Facebook, everything else would easily follow. What do you people think

If only…

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cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
friendica:

"a man says guys i'm standing right here so i can hear everything that you're saying"

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artiman@piefed.social ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
friendica

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- Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I havent tried it in the recent years. Is it coming togheter? Like with groups, events, etc?
  
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  - skribe@piefed.social ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    It has all of them, but it’s bare bones and doesn’t scale well. The instance where I have an account regularly falls over - sometimes for months at a time. Most of my friends there haven’t returned.
    
    I don’t feel it’s currently a viable Facebook alternative, and it would need monumental amounts of work for it to become one.
    
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  - artiman@piefed.social ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    dunno about groups but they have events via mobilizon another federated app that is for events
    
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  - perishthethought@piefed.social ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    No, ime, it looks outdated. See every other comment in this thread for why that is.
    
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Mpeach45@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Getting the core of FB users to move off FB is going to be REALLY hard.

Because people who would love to get off of it are connected there to people who think it is just fine. And those people are also afraid of change.

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6nk06@sh.itjust.works ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

I haven’t tried Friendica yet.

The answer is Friendica.

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folekaule@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
It’s not a matter of software choice, in my opinion. It’s the network effect. Everybody is on Facebook.

Despite its falling out of favor of the younger generation, it still has massive inertia. There’s also the issue of (I think) the overall weariness of being on social media. The halcyon days of that is over; it has become a utility at best.

I think part of the reason I enjoy the fediverse is that it reminds me of the old Internet: loosely connected, federated but independent. We had irc for chat, usenet, and mailing lists. We had like half a dozen IM platforms and tons of bulletin boards.

With that in mind, the solution may be to just let the fediverse evolve: let people find the media that works for them, whether they are into photography, music, politics, whatever. Use the software that makes sense. You don’t have to declare a victor.

The real threat isn’t Facebook: it’s centralization and censorship. The more distributed and heterogenous your ecosystem is, the safer you will be.

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DieserTypMatthias@lemmy.ml ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Friendica exists.

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rozodru@piefed.social ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
as others have stated, Friendica. The issue is finding a stable working instance. I was on Friendica.world but doesn’t work anymore as far as I can tell.

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ExtremeDullard@piefed.social ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Facebook is like Myspace: it’s has-been. If I was a developers interested in contributing to the Fediverse, that’s the last social media I’d choose to spend my time reimplementing.

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- Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  No matter what your opinion on fb is, each time I do my presentation, it’s the main thing people ask me for. To my suprise, even my students in their young 20s are using it a lot, and it’s the main platform for people over 40. Billion of people uses it everyday so I wouldn’t call it has-been. If we could bring even a small percentage of these people to the fedi, it would destabilise the economic model social media is based on. I’m not saying I like fb, I actually never have, but we can’t pretend people are over with it.
  
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  - ExtremeDullard@piefed.social ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I suspect a lot of people use Facebook because they’ve always used Facebook - mostly older folks at this point - and a lot of the younger folks go there because their favorite association / football club / local restaurant / library are there too.
    
    Meaning Facebook’s success today is mostly inertia: there’s no way any open-source replacement would pull a critical-enough mass of people away from Facebook to fight the inertia enjoy any meaningful success. I’m pretty sure open-source developers know this and chose something fancier and more exciting to spend their time on.
    
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  - XiELEd@piefed.social ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I’m pretty much forced to use Facebook and Messenger because of school. Some teachers will grade you only if you upload your work and tag them on there, sometimes you have to repost or like videos because your project is a video and there’s a group competition based on those metrics, and because Messenger is the default mode of communication between students and teachers, as well as a way to contact people for your graded surveys.
    
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- artyom@piefed.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  How many billion active users does myspace have these days?
  
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- Eldritch@piefed.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  People just like what they know. You should spend all your free time making something just like the thing they know. So that they won't use it because they don't know it. It's a catch 22.
  
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Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The main advantage Facebook has is the network effect. Everybody’s on there so it makes little sense to go anywhere else. That will be very hard to overcome no matter how good the alternatives get.

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Nemo@slrpnk.net ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
aren’t there like five of those?

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MadMadBunny@lemmy.ca ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Alternatives do exist; the real thing that’s been missing is the user base. Barely anyone is on it.

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- nocturne@slrpnk.net ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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HootinNHollerin@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
!friendica@lemmy.ca !friendicaworld@lemmy.world !helpers@forum.friendi.ca

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meldrik@lemmy.wtf ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
While Friendica do have groups, it’s very bare bones and the setup is not very intuitive. It’s not like Friendica tells you “Click here to make a group and invite your friends!”.

Friendica honestly just feels like a bare bones version of Mastodon.

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wiki_me@lemmy.ml ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Isn’t basically any software like mastodon where you change the maximum length of posts to be long enough a good alternative? say 1 million words per post.

For group discussions there is piefed/lemmy. And mobilizon for events. for reviews there is neodb.

When i last tried friendica. it was missing the feature which i thought was really good on facebook. seeing what people i appreciate are into by seeing stuff like movies and or even things like meditation or stoicism on their profile page. and maybe reviews of businesses

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pr06lefs@lemmy.ml ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I think something protocol based might be nice. Don’t go to a website, install a program that uses an open protocol. Better for real decentralization, no cookies, no web tracking, just text and maybe pics.

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