chromodynamic

!homecomputing@piefed.social

For people sick of everything requiring Internet connections, online accounts and subscriptions

When trying to convince people to move to Fediverse services, people will often refer to them as "alternatives", calling Mastodon a Twitter-alternative, PeerTube a YouTube-alternative, etc. But I don't think this is the most effective approach.

This is a problem I noticed before I even heard of the Fediverse, because FOSS advocates do the same thing.

The issue is that to the average person, THING-alternative just means that if you already have THING, you don't need it. Or even worse, people will assume it's an inferior imitator. Most people aren't looking for "alternatives". When they adopt new social media it's in response to trends.

Look at mainstream social media for example. When TikTok appeared as a new video platform, it didn't call itself a "YouTube alternative".

So, at a minimum, I would advise not referring to services as "alternatives" but simply "cool new services/apps" and exalting their best features from a user perspective.

I have other thoughts on how to advertise the Fediverse, but I don't want to make this post too long.

Are there any websites or communities dedicated to finding offline alternatives to software that is unnecessarily-Internet based?

I can think of two use cases:

• Software-as-a-service for something that could easily be a downloadable program to run locally
• "Smart" devices that require you to connect to the Internet, and serve you ads

There are websites for finding FOSS alternatives to proprietary apps, EU alternatives to American services, etc. but I don't see a website for local-app alternatives to online services.

What I'm imagining is that someone running a project (like a game studio for example) creates an instance of PieFed or Lemmy or whatever, disables sign-ups, creates community(-ies) for their project(s), and lets people post there.

It would not only allow people to interact without having to create new accounts, but could also help spread awareness of their project.

So I wonder (a) is this possible (b) are the any downsides I'm not aware of.

While I don't currently play online multiplayer games, I have been following the "Stop Killing Games" campaign, and of course noticed that the main reason that publishers can render games unplayable is centralization.

Games didn't always use centralized servers - they used to be run by players, but simply reverting to that model wouldn't provide the functionality players expect. They want to be able to play with people they don't already know - anyone who's online at the same time.

So it seems like a good use case for federation, do you agree? Each instance could be a "playerbase" and allow games to find players and servers to bring together.

I was thinking about account portability. While I haven't had to migrate instances myself, it does seem like it would be highly inconvenient. How do you let people know it's the same account?

The traditional way is to leave a notice on the old account, but what if that's not possible (e.g. the old instance shut down suddenly). It would be better to have a way to automatically let people (and instances) know that the new account is the same user as the old one - so that subscribers stay subscribed, and there is no confusion.

With optional cryptographic signing for account identity, this issue could be ameliorated. The user could keep the private key, and share the public key with Fediverse instances.

What do you think?

Please note: I'm not talking about replacing any existing functionality, only adding to it.

I was looking at Voyager on my phone and saw communities I hadn't subscribed to in my home feed, and upvotes on posts I hadn't voted on (or even seen before). When I tried to remove the upvotes, a message said "problem voting, please try again".

Thankfully, when I view PieFed through Firefox, these problems don't exist, so it must be the app. Not overly surprising since it was initially developed for Lemmy, I believe.

Not sure what changed to cause this problem or whether the change was in Voyager or PieFed.

I'm sure there are some good reasons, but I don't know what those reasons are.

I've noticed that sometimes the instance of the community doesn't match the instance of the user who posted there, and I was wondering why they chose to post to that community instead of an equivalent one on the instance they joined. Are there pros and cons to doing this?