I also switched to Ubuntu from windows not too long ago, but in my case it was from windows 10. It is a night and day as far as the overall experience.

Thanks for the reminder, this is a nice forum. Just registered!

I am definitely looking for platforms that exist and seeing what can be built off of, but from what I can tell, it needs more work than is within the scope of existing platforms. The two primary problems I am working on are 1. Unifying the fediverse functionalities in one place and one clean UI, i.e. microblogs, forum, events, marketplace, etc, and 2. Importing your social graph from any platform, Facebook, Instagram, threads, x, mastodon, bluesky, Lemmy, etc, and recombining it into a single feed as much as possible using activitypub, at protocol, oauth, webscraping, and rss feeds. I am happy to team up with anyone interested, and I will definitely take a look at what you are working on.

User numbers are a basic health metric of any platform. Sociology and economics are very related to the practical functionality of a platform. If users find it too tedious or confusing to use, they won’t use it. If they don’t get good or consistent performance due to poorly optimized infrastructure, them they will not stick around.

I am not saying to use others as models. I am saying that there are basic functionalities that don’t exist in a fully formed way on the fediverse, like private messages or events. This is not some novel concept that Facebook invented but they have done it in a clean and polished way that users appreciate. When they try alternatives on the fediverse, the difference is jarring. That is the discussion I am hoping to have here, not about some theoretical end state of social media platforms operating within a capitalist system that may or may not be based in data or fact.

The fact that the fediverse is young and evolving is what excites me about it. There is tremendous potential, we just have to realize it.

Also, I will mention that part of why Facebook took off like it did, initially, was the ability to import friends from Myspace. This is much more complex and nearly impossible to do today, but I really think we need to look at social graph imports for the fediverse, to allow people a life raft from closed wall platforms. The failures of the past were not an accident, they were carefully planned out by other entities who did things better.

You’re turning a practical functionality discussion into a philosophical debate. I am asking “how can we make the fediverse better and realize it’s true potential”, and your response is “why bother, it’s gonna get enshittified anyway?”. How is that a productive or useful conversation to have?

I am not suggesting to impose any standards on anyway. Thus why I made a post about it to spark discussion, rather than making some declaration one way or another. It needs to be collaborative and democratic, like the rest of the fediverse.

I am building alternatives, as I said in my post. I just thought I would put it out there for discussion to see what others think. Dismissing the conversation and refusing to engage with the actual points on the weaknesses of the fediverse in its current form is not productive, imo. I respect your opinion, and I’m glad you enjoy how it is now. Based on the numbers though, that is not universally the case.

I am not suggesting we take the same path to get to tech behemoth size. I am not evening saying that reaching tech behemoth size is a good thing or something to strive for. But could we at least try to register on the scale at all, and could we do that in a way that sticks to a set of morals and ethics from the ground up of the platforms architecture? It’s one thing to say “enjoy the platform for what it is”, it’s another to say “what it is is what it always will be” or even what it should be. It is far from what it should be imo, which is the whole point of the post.

Are you saying that none of the points about the current structure of the fediverse are valid? That we should not try to have more streamlined and functional platforms for users to migrate to? The fact that these platforms are hard to market by their very nature would seem to be even more of an argument for a more fully featured and frictionless experience, would it not?

The Google trends I have seen are far more than 0.1% of people out there. I know many people personally who would love to leave Facebook, but there is no good alternative, and the issues I mentioned above are contributing factors. We can keep sticking our head in the sand and saying that it is what it is, and the fediverse will never grow because no one wants it, or we can try to understand why users are not being retained and seek to address those issues. It’s less about validation and more about providing real alternatives for people. I kind of thought that was what this whole thing was about.

That is a pretty defeatist attitude. It’s also not really based on any data or facts. What evidence do you have that small social media will inevitably be bought up and enshittified when they become popular? Especially ones run on open source software and run by communities and non-profits. I’m not saying we should change how the fediverse is run at a fundamental level, but we need to be honest about the limitations and work to address them. Is that not something we should be striving to do?

We really need an alternative to Lemmy and piefed for the threadiverse. I say this as a leftist. People are not children who need child locks put on their internet. This is not the type of environment I joined the fediverse to be a part of, that censors links just because the server admin disagrees with the politics.

Gotcha. Well hope I set you on the right track at least, not sure what else I can do to troubleshoot. At least p.piefed.social works, so that’s good.

I don’t consciously remember making it, but I might have made it in the troubleshooting phase. In any case, still doesn’t explain why I cannot login with any credentials at piefed.social. I am able to login to p.piefed.social, but those exact saved login credentials do not work on piefed.social.

When I click that I get a blank website that says not found, so I am not sure where in the user list you saw that. Unless I just can’t see it because it’s banned. I do not recall consciously making another username after I was banned, unless I had done that to try to see if it was an IP ban.

The username is korendian, and the handle is @robert.meyer86@piefed.social. Neither of those work to login at piefed.social, nor does my email, but I can use my email and that password to login at p.piefed.social. I think it is some discrepancy in the naming system, as viewing my profile from different sites shows different username/handles. Here is a view from several different sites showing that korendian and robert.meyer86@piefed.social are the same account, but depending on where it is viewed, korendian and robert.meyer86 both show as the username or handle (I.e., piefed.social seems to have korendian@piefed.social as the handle, but Lemmy.zip shows the handle as robert.meyer86@piefed.social. I am honestly unsure which is the right one to be honest).

https://imgur.com/a/4wWVO0L

I have not used p.piefed.social prior to it being suggested here. Here are some screenshots to show the banned screen and the login screen, as well as another strange effect where I get a 404 error on using a username for login on p.piefed.social, but am able to login with e-mail address without an issue.

https://imgur.com/a/UX8pG8F

Appreciate that! Unfortunately it did not change anything, p.piefed.social works fine, but piefed.social still says banned.

I appreciate that! The feed takes a bit to load, and when it does, it just says “Nothing to see here”. The profile, avatar and any other info related to the profile does not load, but it also does not let me attempt to login again and acts like it is logged in, even though it seems as if it is not.