Social media sucks. Platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are designed to turn your precious free time into money. What we see as a nice way to stay in touch with our friends, in reality are just many hits of dopamine stimulating precise spots in your brain, leading to you spending more time on the platform consuming ads.

But what if I told you that there is a huge ad-free social network out there, not governed by a central authority, full of great people and completely free to use? This place is called the Fediverse. Well, it’s not really a place, it’s many places.

See the 6 reasons and a good short overview of what the Fediverse is about at https://slashdev.space/posts/2021-01-18-reasons-the-fediverse-is-better

#technology #opensource #fediverse #alternativeto #privacy

  • Dreeg Ocedam@lemmy.ml
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    4 years ago

    You probably heard that the Twitter-account of Donald Trump recently got compromised by the owners of the platform. I don’t want to engage in any political discussions, but the main flaw with this is the violation of freedom of speech.

    No its not! In my opinion, Twitter should have banned Trump a long time ago. He has been posting dangerous content for way too long. Freedom of speech only means that you can share your ideas. It doesn’t mean that anyone has to give you a platform to do so, and it doesn’t mean that you can threaten people.

    There are issues with Twitter having so much power to silence people. For example, they also recently banned Sci-Hub. Similarly other GAFAMS have already hurt LGBT communities and other minorities with excessive bans. Federation does solve a lot of theses issues. Someone mostly disliked like trump, would be booted of most instances, while Sci-Hub, or LGBT communities, would be able to find many willing instances to host their content.

    The idea that the Fediverse promotes the completely stupid “Free speech” view of the alt-right where anyone can say anything to anyone without any consequence is absolutely false. What the Fediverse enables is the possibility to have the rules of what is accepted be much more democratic.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.ml
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      4 years ago

      Right, and we see that nazis have a much harder time on Fediverse than on Twitter precisely because policy is driven democratically instead of being decided by a corporation. I think the other big aspect is that Fediverse is operated largely nonprofit and people running instances are able to make morally sound decisions because of that. Twitter refuses to ban nazis because that would negatively affect their bottom line, and any moral considerations are secondary to that.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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      4 years ago

      Yeah I found that strange too lol. The fediverse as a whole is much less tolerant of racism / fascism than the social media giants.

    • Kinetix
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      4 years ago

      Excellent points, one of the numerous things the article is incorrect about.