5mo ago

John Oliver promoted alternatives to big tech in last night's episode, including Mastodon and Pixelfed

It's brief, around 25:15

If you've been sitting on making a post about your favorite instance, this could be a good opportunity to do so.

Going by our registration applications, a lot of people are learning about the fediverse for the first time and they're excited about the idea. I've really enjoyed reading through them :)

Buy European @feddit.uk

Now John Oliver is promoting alternatives!tive

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Fediverse @lemmy.ml

John Oliver promoted alternatives to big tech in last night's episode, including Mastodon and Pixelfed

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Would like to get my family on Signal. I deleted my facebook account and now we use various other chat apps that I don't quite like
- I've never understood why people just can't send messages through text. Like why do they need a special app in order to do it.
  I don't use Facebook myself and my family members just started texting me and honestly it's so much easier
  Don't get me wrong, I definitely think that signal is more secure. I just don't understand why people just install another app in order to communicate with their family, just let them know you're available through text
  edit: I want to clarify that I may not have been clear/missed saying in this post, I'm not saying people shouldn't(if people would change I would love it), I'm saying I don't understand why people do knowing that your family members aren't going to care and are just going to text you anyway as has been my experience
  
  SMS is incredibly antiquated as soon as you want to do anything multimedia, or heck sending an SMS longer than 144 characters.
  My mother received a video over SMS the other day and it legitimately looked like it was filmed on a Nokia 6310.
  I've encouraged my family to use Signal to replace SMS and it functions really well as an SMS upgrade. It's more secure, private, supports sending decent quality multimedia, the interface is simplistic, it has formatting, does video calls well, and you can send a long message without it being a hacked together string of 5 messages.
  From both a security and usability perspective, it wins out on SMS in my opinion.
  Edit: there's also the nightmare of group chats with SMS. I hate when extended family try to use it
  
  Don't get me wrong, I agree with everything you've said here.
  SMS and MMS are an antique technology, I can't argue that. But it's not going to change the fact that my family is not going to install another messaging app on their device in order to talk to me. They're going to text me or call me anyway so therefore there's no point, and hopefully with the improvements on the RCS standard the issues that have occurred with SMS and MMS will go away.
  As is I have four different messaging apps on my phone ignoring my messages app, signal (which I can count on one hand the amount of my friends that have an account), Discord which the majority of my online friends are on, and less than a handful of my relatives are on. Telegram which I mostly have for artists, and Revolt which I really should uninstall but like I really want that project to go somewhere.
  My family is almost exclusively on Facebook messenger, I do not use Facebook Messenger, sms/rcs is the only system that my relatives and I both have, and they're not about to install another app, to talk to one person which would be me.
  So yes I fully agree with everything you've stated there, 100%. But it's a perfect example of how on paper it sounds amazing but in practice it doesn't work. At the end of the day my family is going to text me regardless if I tell them that I'm on Signal, because I'm not on Facebook and they already have SMS on their phone
  
  Oh in practice it works quite well for me, basically all my friends and family use Signal now. You can slightly push them towards that, explain the obvious pros, it's simple to install, so it's just a small matter of convincing. I only rarely use WhatsApp for some external groups.
  
  Whatsapp isn't really a thing in my area but man is Facebook messenger is, but yeah nice that you were able, I didn't have much luck with my relatives to switch over to signal or Discord back when it took off, they just sort of stayed on Facebook.
  My online friend group had a higher adoption rate for discord from skype at first but, that might just be because I refused to give them my phone number so they couldn't access me elsewhere.
  Really the only group that I had really have an interest in other alternatives, was my cybersecurity class in college, but even they tended to straight towards Discord more than signal (which is insane to me)
  
  i imagine its because text messages are saved by your provider and can be used or accessed by law enforcement even if deleted. but that may or may not be an issue for most people swapping recipes or talking to their family about normal every day stuff.
  
  Yeah I believe that, the people I have on my signal are generally ones that are worried that the cops are going to track them or something. I fully agree that privacy is important, unfortunately my family and the general public care is significantly less
  
  Maybe you want to communicate through an encrypted service?
  
  SMS is a pain in the ass. iOS users aren't using SMS, they're using a proprietary system which is inaccessible to android users. Occasionally a 1-on-1 text works with RCS but it's janky
  
  IOS has had native RCS since they launched IOS 18 back in like August/September-ish, I haven't had much issue with support from IOS to Android RCS side, but I'm not sure what my family in Florida use for their iphones, I expect older models might struggle. I have however had issues with communicating with my mom, but I believe it's because she doesn't understand that when she has RCS enabled, and she turns off data, it wants to try using RCS, then fails, and then falls-back to SMS, which for some reason Samsung Messages struggles with.
  Personally speaking though, my S20 hasen't had any issues with RCS period, its always been other devices not actually sending proceeding to error and then the person not noticing it so therefore not retrying

304 comments