Thanks, been interested in searx for a while, tired of duckduckgo, clearly we need a decentralized answer to search

a few things I’ve noticed when trying to tell people on Facebook/twitter about fedi

1. General ignorance
2. social inertia
3. anxiety of choice
4. Low payoff

1. General Ignorance, as to what the fediverse is, how it works, why it’s better than corporate media.

Often when I recommend fedi to people on FB, they will assume it’s just another twitter/facebook, they think mastodon is just another private company, and so you have to explain that to them, no, it’s not a corporation, anyone can start an instance. Even coop loving anarchists have trouble grasping this. Most normies don’t even know what FOSS is or why it’s good, many people, especially and ironically leftists, are hostile to even the idea of privacy “what’s the point, the government already knows everything.”

This general ignorance is made worse by the fact that private companies have advertising campaigns that allow their private platforms to fill niches that FOSS would otherwise fille ( see the success of Xoom or Discord in recent years ) Many people, especially ironically leftists, are also under the impression that facebook will last forever, and no new platforms could ever become socially relevant, which is rediculous.

2. Social inertia, unwillingness to try new things,

This is especially true of melenials, Gen X, not to mention boomers, they don’t want to learn something new, they’re obsessed with ‘convenience’ and will say things like 'no one has time to set up a new account" ( I work in customer service, motherfuckers will spend 12 hours on the phone getting a free netflix )

They have their groups, they’re friend circle, their uploaded photos, archived conversations, they’re attached to facebook or twitter and don’t want to leave, the algorithm on facebook is especially effective at making people emotionally dependent. Especially Ironically leftists are very tied to the idea that leftbook is their connection to the masses and that outside of that they’d be isolated – this is when almost all leftbook groups are private, they are constantly being archived, they’re not publicly accessible, and are mostly full of sectarian shit talking. They’re not reaching the masses, they’re contained in an echochamber.

I think gen z are not so attached to web 2.0 but they are susceptable to new corporate platforms that start the cycle over again.

3. Anxiety of Choice: Which platform/ instance do I choose?

This is something I’ve struggled with personally, like finding good instances has literally taken me years, maybe now it’s easier to find one, but even then things could change, like at first I was on diaspora and that just fizzled out. There’s also problem with large instances having little or no registration, whereas a corporate platform will always be open.

4. Low Payoff, what’s the point, I don’t know anyone here.

This is a vicious cycle where there’s not many people on the platform, so if you go on mastodon, you’re unlikely to find people you already know or a large community with people who share your interests. So many people create an account, get bored, and leave to never come back.

With mastodon in particular, it’s full of Furries and anti-semtites and programmers!!! and everyone hates nerds and weeboos.

reading the comments, there’s definitely some GrapheneOS hate based on the developers behavior mostly, IMO whether or not the dev is an asshole doesn’t mean it isn’t a solid ROM, just like i don’t agree with Lemmy admins politics (me being an anarchist) i can still recognize this is a valuable platform worthy of support.

One criticism is that GrapheneOS only supports the Pixel line, these phones are google and have shitty screens, no headphone jacks and only one i know has an SD card slot, that’s my main issue, on the idea of ‘google hardware’ being evil, it’s possible there are hardware backdoors similar to ME, this is true of pretty much any phone.

Another criticism is that Graphene doesn’t support any kind of GAPPs, personally this is a plus for me, GAPPs, even MicroG present a huge privacy risk, but some people need GAPPs for whatever reason, an alternative security focused OS that does suppor GAPPs is CalyxOS https://calyxos.org

LineageOS is usually my Go To as it supports a wide variety of phones, but there are issues depending on model, as many devices are marked ‘officially supported’ when they are still very unstable or sparsely maintained, LineageOS doesn’t generally get the same kernel patches and necessary security updates that GrapheneOS/CalyxOS does, so these two are preferable if security/privacy are high priority. If you just want a googless phone with reasonable security/privacy, especially if you have an old phone you’d like to breath new life into. Lineage will probably be fine.

https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/

came here to say that

A Pixel 3 and above running GrapheneOS is probably the most secure available https://grapheneos.org/faq

Graphene is solid, stable and secure, if the app requires Gplay it WILL NOT RUN, you cannot sideload GAPPS the way you can on regular Lineage.

For most cases I recommend Lineage, but if you’re really concerned about privacy Graphene is way to go.

that’s encouraging, yeah it should be up at some point this summer…

I’m sure it wouldn’t be that hard to add anonymity, make it a little more multimedia centric, could totally work as an imageboard.

Also i with think with the way activity pub works, a lemmy instance should be able to federate with other platforms entirely, like for example if fchan takes off, or if discourse or flarum implement federations, would be possible all these forums could federate together, assuming they all complied to a certain standard – but that is probably a far way off and assumes all these different projects would want to federate with each other.

imageboards are perfect for niche communties, i just like theme - -file sharing + anonymity can be very useful, but imageboards since 4chan have been domination by nazis, there have been specifically anarchist chans before like 0chan and laguna.pw but those didn’t last long.

The idea is just to get a specifically anarchist board up, and and a friend working on our own platform because most of the available options have major issues, but it’s in the early stages of developement, in the short term tho, shouldn’t be hard to get something up to serve that purpose.

I can’t say much about the project right now and sry battery died went to sleep) our project wasn’t going to be federated, there is one federated imageboard out there https://github.com/FChannel0 but i’ve only recently learned about it – their politics are… what you’d expect lol

there’s a variety fo boards we looks at, here’s a rundown:

Tinyboard and It’s fork vichan have been the gold standard for imageboards for over a decade, from 8chan, lainchan and archive.arisuchan.jp all run/ran on varients of Vichan/Tinyboard, the problem is tb/vichan were designed for php5.6 and basically break on php7.3 Here’s the vichan main https://github.com/vichan-devel a couple of newer forks a rebirth of tinyboard https://github.com/Circlepuller/Tinyboard/ OpenIB-relaoded https://github.com/9san/OpenIB-Reloaded

To replace Vichan, a few imageboard engines have been propsed, the most popular is Lynxchan https://gitgud.io/LynxChan/LynxChan JSChan looks promising but still unstable https://github.com/fatchan/jschan/ Gochan is another one http://gochan.org/ Meguca, honorable mention https://github.com/bakape/meguca Even a tinyib has it’s merits https://gitlab.com/tslocum/tinyib

in any case nice to meet fellow sysop in this here parts, maybe we both start our own instances and federate with each other

I have been working on another project, an imageboard, but many issues with security/stability we’ve been ironing out, whereas lemmy is impressively designed and documented, haven’t tried out mobile yet, and i have some issues with how it does federation , but this is very early on so i can’t be too critical.

glad to hear you’re getting an instance up, honestly i don’t think everything anarchists are involved with needs to be explicitly anarchists, we don’t need pictures of kropotkin everywhere, a general purpose instance ( with popular /gaming /movie subs etc. ) with a left libertarian bent, and where anarchists are an active minority is more desirable really, especially considering how new lemmy is as a platform.

hey, that’s you, how you doin?

Yeah I came here just to ask this, I agree with your reasoning completely, and I also don’t want to be the only guy running it haha, i am going to do a test install on a VM and see how easily i can get it working and polished, i’ll keep you posted if you like.

But I doubt it would really get that big, not n the short term, while i think lemmy has more potential than raddle in terms of growth, we can take a lesson from them and see how long and tedious building an anarhcist forum can be. 3 to 5 comitted sysops could manage the server easily, and moderators can jvolunteer themselves from the userbase, naturally the sysops have their own interests, and opinions – which are separate from managing the site itself – so long as we don’t impose our most unpoular opinoins on the userbase and run things professionally we can avoid (most of) the drama. Being an anarhist forum policy descisions/moderation can be decided by collective descisions, you can hold polls and things like that ( lemmy supports polls right? )

I have heard/seen/read some bad things, but once this place takes off and there are a few dozen servers the tanks won’t really be able to police the politics of the lemmiverse, mastodon presents itself as a vision of the future for all federated platforms.

If they make a good platform that’s easy to use, follows foss standards, respects privacy and all that jizz, then the personal political options of the devs would be secondary, many open source developers have held dispicable options coughstallmancough

I see that raddle doesn’t like lemmy too much, reading their arguments they have fairly legitimate criticisms, but they seem a bit too personally invested in, are very focused on the interest of their site ( which is the responsible thing to do) but seem to miss the whole point of federation: you can just start your own instance while reaching out to a vast network of autonomous groups, it’s a great way to radicalize/educate people…and prevents you from being contained in an echochamber

I disagree with the opposition to federation voiced by some, but raddle has a solid board already and there’s no reason for them to jump on the federation train rather than down the line adding a federation plugin once post-mill has reached that stage of development.

lemmings are the masses, lemurs are the sophisticrats who must be overthrown