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.

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[–] ExtremeDullard@piefed.social 16 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

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.