Ooooo, someone’s getting worried!

I agree with you, and I think there’s a tension between the technical solution (meeting users where they are) and political solution (persuading the users to come to our way of thinking).

The technical solution is an unequal fight. We have to provide a familiar and equally good experience - integrating everything into these easy-to-use everything apps, on a shoestring budget compared to the proprietary apps. And, without the “education”, users will converge on particular instances because that’s what’s most convenient, giving a lot of power to particular players in the network.

If we can persuade people to prioritise freedom over convenience, then we end up with a much more resilient userbase who will go help with the existing networks.

I don’t know how we can make people care, though. The free software movement has been trying for 40 years to make regular users care, but the message only really lands with developers. There’s certainly more interest in taking down big tech nowadays, but convenience still seems to come first.

Searching for a single Discord alternative may be asking the wrong question however. Discord itself is an extensive bundle of functions smashed together: real-time chat, persistent forums and documentation, voice chats, events and even games. Rather than replicating that bundle in a single app, the open social web may be converging on a different model entirely, where specialised services handle specific functions while sharing identity and social connections across protocol boundaries. These individual services themselves do not have to share the same protocol underneath, and may actually work better if they don’t, with each protocol handling the part it is best designed for.

This is the most interesting part to me. Can users be persuaded to have different expectations from the proprietary apps they’re used to?

Whenever these sudden migrations happen, the alternatives that win seem to be the ones that look and behave as similarly to the proprietary app as possible, as the people switching don’t care about decentralisation, and are much more sensitive to any changes in experience.

I think we need to create separate experiences, backed by the same protocol, for people who care about decentralisation and freedom (and discover the fediverse naturally, outside of these big migrations), and those that show up during the big migrations.

For the first group, we want software that’s easy to self-host, customisable, spreads users between instances, ultimately empowers them to have the exact experience they want. For the second group, we should just copy the exact experience of the proprietary networks as much as the protocol allows.

Of course, the risk is that we get even larger influxes of people who never had to learn the community norms. Is that worth it? - I’m not sure.

I use mythic beasts. They are not the very cheapest, but they offer predictable pricing and just charge a fixed increase compared to the price they pay their supplier. You can trust that they won’t mess around with the renewal price or arbitrary extra fees.

For my .org domains I pay ~£15 per year, but if you don’t care about the tld, you can get some for ~£6 per year (the costs on the website exclude VAT, but if you buy multiple years at a time, the amortised cost including VAT ~= the price excluding VAT).

It is not OP claiming that. It is the description from the link preview.

It’s an alternative to Lemmy with some different features. Since it uses the same protocol under the hood, its instances federate with Lemmy. There’s more info on the differences here.

I get you. I can never think of anything that would be interesting to post or ask in the more discussion-oriented communities, let alone choose a specific one to post in. I definitely find comments easier, as well as posting to more niche communities. I feel the scope is usually better defined there.

Would you say it’s about not knowing if your post would be accepted in the community, or just finding the best place for it? If it’s the latter, AskLemmy could be good for general questions, or failing that, any of the casual chat communities such as !chat@beehaw.org.

As long as your post meets the rules of the community/instance, I feel it’s better to post somewhere than not at all - people can always crosspost it elsewhere if they like.

You can trust the software in your distro’s repositories (if you run a distro with well-maintained repositories). This is because, generally only well-known software gets packaged, the packager should be familiar with both the project and the code, and everything is rebuilt on the distro’s own infrastructure, to ensure that a given binary actually corresponds to the source.

It might still be possible for things to slip through, but it’s certainly much safer than random programs from online.

This might be a silly question, but in what ways did it get worse? Is it the size of the keyboard changing, the predictions not being as good anymore or something else?

With my knowledge of tech companies, I’m not exactly surprised, but I’m not an iPhone user and struggling to understand how a keyboard of all things could get worse.

There were some breakthroughs in postmarketOS with the BlackBerry KEY2 recently. I really hope a phone with the Blackberry Classic form factor gets good mobile linux support in the next few years (bonus points if it’s a linux-first device!) A physical keyboard (in that form factor) is one of the few things that could convince me to ditch the Librem 5.

I grew up on the tail end of Blackberry’s dominance. Most of the people in my school had a Blackberry, I’ve always envied those keyboards, and I feel really nostalgic about them.

There’s something special about that form factor that appeals to me more than the N900 or clamshell designs. I think it’s that they’re happy to compromise the screen for a great keyboard, rather than the other way round.