Fediverse

Everyone has already recommended friendica, but there is also hubzilla which is a fork of friendica and has much more. Its relatively unknown but very powerful, also there is this family of platforms that are for smaller communities for facebook alternative, friendica, hubzilla, streams, forte. You might want to give these a try, friendica is the oldest but others have evolved and have better ui/features and superb privacy controls.

links:
#^https://github.com/friendica/friendica
#^https://framagit.org/hubzilla/core
#^https://codeberg.org/streams/streams
#^https://codeberg.org/fortified/forte

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

Well if you want decentralised solutions, there's Mattermost and there's just a plain old Matrix server. Both are better-suited to collaboration projects than Facebook ever was. I'd argue the only reason it ever morphed into that role in the first place was because everyone was on there, it had little to do with features.

I realize that a viable, decentralized altenative to Facebook is IMO the biggest missing piece of the puzzle.

We already have it. It's called Friendica.

We need something that offers some kind of central platform for networking

Central platforms bad.

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

If only...

One huge problem is that most people on Facebook neither know nor care what sinister things Meta are doing to them. Everyone thinks they're immune to propaganda, and most people don't understand the true extent with which they're being tracked or what's being done with that data.

No it's not.

It's called Friendica.

friendica:

friendica

Friendica exists.

I haven’t tried Friendica yet.

The answer is Friendica.

Getting the core of FB users to move off FB is going to be REALLY hard.

Because people who would love to get off of it are connected there to people who think it is just fine. And those people are also afraid of change.

It's not a matter of software choice, in my opinion. It's the network effect. Everybody is on Facebook.

Despite its falling out of favor of the younger generation, it still has massive inertia. There's also the issue of (I think) the overall weariness of being on social media. The halcyon days of that is over; it has become a utility at best.

I think part of the reason I enjoy the fediverse is that it reminds me of the old Internet: loosely connected, federated but independent. We had irc for chat, usenet, and mailing lists. We had like half a dozen IM platforms and tons of bulletin boards.

With that in mind, the solution may be to just let the fediverse evolve: let people find the media that works for them, whether they are into photography, music, politics, whatever. Use the software that makes sense. You don't have to declare a victor.

The real threat isn't Facebook: it's centralization and censorship. The more distributed and heterogenous your ecosystem is, the safer you will be.

as others have stated, Friendica. The issue is finding a stable working instance. I was on Friendica.world but doesn't work anymore as far as I can tell.

Facebook is like Myspace: it's has-been. If I was a developers interested in contributing to the Fediverse, that's the last social media I'd choose to spend my time reimplementing.

The main advantage Facebook has is the network effect. Everybody's on there so it makes little sense to go anywhere else. That will be very hard to overcome no matter how good the alternatives get.

aren't there like five of those?

Alternatives do exist; the real thing that’s been missing is the user base. Barely anyone is on it.

As an example: we have 9.1 million people in Quebec, Canada. How many are on Friendica?

Not even a hundred.

USERS are what’s missing.

!friendica@lemmy.ca

While Friendica do have groups, it’s very bare bones and the setup is not very intuitive. It’s not like Friendica tells you “Click here to make a group and invite your friends!”.

Friendica honestly just feels like a bare bones version of Mastodon.

Isn't basically any software like mastodon where you change the maximum length of posts to be long enough a good alternative? say 1 million words per post.

For group discussions there is piefed/lemmy. And mobilizon for events. for reviews there is neodb.

When i last tried friendica. it was missing the feature which i thought was really good on facebook. seeing what people i appreciate are into by seeing stuff like movies and or even things like meditation or stoicism on their profile page. and maybe reviews of businesses

I think something protocol based might be nice. Don't go to a website, install a program that uses an open protocol. Better for real decentralization, no cookies, no web tracking, just text and maybe pics.