I do a presentation of the Fediverse to my college students 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 and working alternative to their counterparts. 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.
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.
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 and 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.
Creating a Facebook replacement would be about as exciting as creating a Visual Basic replacement: millions of people still use VB, but nobody wants to touch a dying technology.
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 Facebook, sometimes you have to repost or like videos because your project is a video and there’s a group competition based on those metrics. Messenger is the default mode of communication between students and teachers, as well as a way to contact people for your graded surveys.
I’ve avoided Facebook for so long, the idea that it’s required as part of an ‘education system’ bewilders me. Wow.
Report those fuckers to the school board and files complaints.
People need to protest social media as part of education and fuck schools that vendor lock in their students to M$ bullshit as well.
It is not feasible unfortunately, and if I were to put that as a complaint, I would most likely be called unhinged, out-of-touch, or trying to discard a perfectly usable system. We can only raise questions and influence people as of now. Besides, the reason why Messenger is popular is because of the freebasics service which allows people to use Messenger for free.
lol fuck that apathetic attitude.
We all need to be sand in their oligarch machines.
Schools need to teach that “FREE” does not mean free. Might be another good thing to bring up with the school board cause clearly that’s a lesson they didn’t learn.
Apathetic attitude? Not everyone has the privilege of having ever been under an authority figure who actually cares about their job. My university can’t even bother to fix their drainage system, my city has had its reputation dragged in the mud on national TV for its shitty (literally) garbage collection system (btw, I still see NOTHING came out from the publicity), even though people have been complaining about these for months. Do you seriously think they’ll take my opinion seriously? If I try to rally people to my cause, which would most likely be on Facebook, people would just snarkily say I’m overreacting and that I’m a hypocrite for using Facebook (which is the only way I could reach them in the first place). Even when I complained about the drainage system I was being name-called and insulted by someone who thought that making any demands to a school as a student was being entitled and what did I get out of it? Nothing! Do you think the geriatrics at the upper level even care about privacy or information? They still admire Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg goddammit! Have you ever had to really fight for a cause? Because you are painting an unrealistic landscape that I’ve never been able to see my entire life.