I always find these arguments are almost in bad faith. Sure there are always alternatives, but that’s like saying the alternative to driving to work is walking. It works, but only so far as it is practical. I am so glad I found Lemmy and fortunately the community has been forced here by Reddit, but how many posts were on this platform 2 days ago, how many will be here in a week? I am hopeful this will last, but platforms are only as powerful as their users, and the general public tends to congregate in the largest, easiest to use location.
For me at least, I found here the same kind of content I used Reddit for, so as long as these stay around I have good reason to do so.
I also like the federation “movement”, (imo) it feels more cozy and enhances the sense of a community.
i havent seen content on reddit like this in years
I remember the before fore times, things spread fine, you talked to your friends fine, you just didnt have immediate access to rooms full of millions, you actually had to say something worth being shared to such a scope (esp the times when its sub-optimal to not be able to plead to the masses). Federation can fix a lot of the obvious issues with that older setup. The protocol could have been established then, we already did it for email and newsgroups.
There is a great site called https://alternativeto.net where you can search for open source software that you could use instead of a proprietary one. For exampe Photoshop -> Gimp
I know there arent perfect alternatives for everything but i found a few cool ones for myself that i use every day now.
Big tech will never love Lemmy because power belongs to the community.
thats ok, big tech cant really make money off this anyway, the proof is in the pudding, just let us run our space, go throw some crap on billboards and on our video streams. its insane we need brokers and gatekeepers for simple formatted text messages.
And with enough federated servers in the network they could never hope to have the reach of things like Lemmy and Mastodon. Server costs would be massively spread out instead of reliant on one corporation.
It’s even possible to run it on old PC that wasn’t used long ago, so everything will be good as long as community exist
Be careful with that thinking. That way can lead to complacency. Big tech loves embrace, extend, extinguish
I could see a corp like Microsoft or Google or someone else seeing long term value in federated services. They could create a service utilizing the technology and spread it to their user base. Slowly add in some special sauce to their own version of it to attract more people to their part of it. Then break compatibility with everything else to stop someone from stealing users back.
i mean yeah you can find an alternative of a certain service, the problem is the little or few content are in certain services or a few little community engaging.
Be the change. If few people actively try to build an alternative the network effect will do the rest.
