I think we may already be at the next oasis. It’s just the normal progression. People said similar things about AOL, MySpace, Friendster, LiveJournal, Delphi, CompuServe, etc. We’ll find new places to hang out. And then we’ll move on when they inevitably collapse.
It’s starting to feel like an oasis to me. The comments are generally friendly and helpful. Every day seems to bring more interesting posts than the previous one. I’m trying to do my part by posting and commenting more than I did on Reddit. This is nice.
As far as the fediverse not being “ready”, I certainly feel like it’s ready for me. But of course we’re talking personally. I definitely agree it’s not ready for users looking for the easiest route to log in and have everything be ready and easy and setup for them.
I’m stoked right now, I feel like I’m in high school screwing around on the internet again!
Commendable. Sad to report Duo became substantially more useless to me the moment they locked all the forums. Turkish is the third most difficult language I could possibly be learning, and though the mods seemed pretty good, it was not one of the courses that got a ton of love in the first place. Which made user input invaluable to understanding things like concepts that didn't even have english equivalents or acceptable alternatives the system wasn't programmed to pick up on.
As it is now, I have to google it and pray to god there's something intelligible. To its credit, they still don't seem to have caught on yet that desktop doesn't have their stupid hearts.
I'm using a different app and learning different language but I discovered that for grammatical breakdowns of sentences and "why there's this word in this sentence?" ChatGPT and HuggingFace chat are quite good. Definitely not simultaneous interpretator level but for a beginner like me it's enough
So I keep saying that humans have evolved in small communities, and that's where we thrive. But I also loved the global Reddit community. This is just crazy how you can just reach anything and anyone with one login. I guess Twitter was similar, just... Shittier?
Kinda how I feel. I think it's probably bad to be subjected to what everyone is thinking all the time, particularly when paired with anonymity. But... I liked it. Not gonna lie, when I hit the end of my Lemmy feed I still load up reddit in the browser. But it's already gotten so much less useful, it's crazy! The blackouts have really fucked it up as far as looking up information via reddit. As well it should, fuck them for ruining a good (or at least decent?) thing. But it was always nice having so much of the internet in one place.
"The fediverse isn’t ready to take over yet." and I think that it doesn't matter that much. You need to form a community, big or small, but a healthy one, and then make your way from there. Some platforms are, yes, still in early stages, but I think the communities are actually helping developers because they can give the developerse feedbacks about new features, bugs etc. etc.
"the fediverse isn't ready to take over yet" - so put time and attention into making it ready instead of trying to build something completely new. If enough businesses and public figures put their resources into getting the fediverse beefed up (or dumbed down/simplified) to where the public needs it to be to meet their needs, it could happen much sooner. And it'd be better in the long run than whatever replacement will just follow the exact same villain character arc as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter - sell more shit to you and let the app fucking break.
These people want another Facebook/Instagram/Twitter. They want a fully centralized platform with outreach. They need places to advertise and stuff. Hell, I believe that's why these papers have been so mute on the Fediverse. It makes it way harder to advertise, get clicks and stuff. Threads is the one I can see them starting to push really hard since it has all the centralization and trackers. Not even Bluesky has that.
This attitude of waiting for someone (i.e those seeking corporate payouts) to build a perfect thing for us is the attitude which leaves us in the position of passive consumers/products being milked by enshittifying data harvesters.
I know it's a cliche but we do need to become the change we want to see and make it better ourselves.
maybe, just maybe, develop some in-person relationships with the people in your immediate social circle/geographic area. it worked really well up until around 30 years ago.
But yes, death of monolithic social media companies would be a good thing on many levels both individual, societal and political level. Especially the American social media media monopoly ending would be such a excellent thing. It has been as controlling over the world as the dollar or US military.