- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Text for readability:
So far, Americans using RedNote have said they don’t care if China has access to their data. Viral videos on TikTok in recent days have shown Americans jokingly saying they will miss their personal “Chinese spy,” while others say they are purposefully giving RedNote access to their data in a show of protest against the wishes of the U.S. government.
“This also highlights the fact that people are thirsty for platforms that aren’t controlled by the same few oligarchs,” Quintin said. “People will happily jump to another platform even if it presents new, unknown risks.”
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If you want more people to join the fediverse, you have to improve the user experience. People don’t want to read an article breaking down what the fediverse is, how to join an instance, how to find content, etc.
Streamline the join process so it doesn’t require learning the lore and technical training. Stop promoting the fediverse generally, and instead push people to easy to use frontends and popular instances. Remove the barriers to entry. If they want to dig deeper into different instances and the technical stuff, let them do that later. Stop loading the info dump at the front.
I agree that promoting the fediverse generally kind of doesn’t make sense. People join communities, not web protocols.
I wonder if we shouldn’t talk so much about “the fediverse” as we do about individual instances, because that’s what people actually join. They get the rest of the fediverse for free, but their home server will always be home. Just like with reddit back in the day, how I may not have identified much with the reddit overculture, I did love some of its communities.
Like look at the difference between the slrpnk communities, and the programming.dev communities. That’s something to be celebrated, like, come join this server - look at all the cool things we’re doing!
You get it. Well said.
Fediverse and decentralism confused me initially but then I learned I can just sign up at lemmy.world and use it normally without having to know the backend.
I dunno this kinda cracks me up a little because like…if you dig deep enough, were people flame-warring on usenet or BBS (wait lemme finish! Lol) over:
“Email needs way better UX and an insta-one-click-sign-up zero-thinking on-ramp so even a single-celled organism can figure it out!”?
That’s the easiest descriptor nowadays that explains the Fediverse. Email. “What if Twitter but as a generalized service that anybody could run, like email. Yahoo? Gmail? RobertLovesSurfing.net? They can all email each other but your account lives on one.”
A better way of seeking out an instance could be handy perhaps. I found Mastodon pretty smooth with “Hey you might like these if…!” Sort of suggestions. The openness of the platform should make this a much easier task than it might be otherwise, I think.
I also think better explaining the portability of your account data would help people see the benefit there.
I’d like more kinds of nerds to have an easier time getting on the Fediverse with us, so let’s improve that, but I also think we’re less popular BECAUSE the Fediverse is more about human communication much like “The Old Internet”, and less about desperate vapid fame-seeking and self-marketing and identity-as-brand, like Web2/3.0.
A lot of me thinks we’re here because corpo-net “disrupted” our forums and blogs away.
IMHO, the commercial-verse can keep its skibidis and hauk-tuas and *“Oh suddenly I’m famous! thanks for the gold kind stranger!”*s
I don’t think it’s cruel elitist “gatekeeping” to say the Fediverse is for anybody! But maybe not for Everybody. (Imagine if major brands discovered everybody moved to the Fediverse, for instance. Yikes.)
BTW it’s 2025 and plenty of people I’ve observed, here in the U.S, still complain that email is “too complicated.” (And no, they weren’t formerly from an uncontacted tribe or rescued from a sealed 1950’s fallout shelter.)
We could make things a bit easier to understand and smoother to experience, but trying to UX-away the requirement for a modicum of intelligence required is not a great end goal, I think.
Lemmy doesn’t have the censorship and speech-control from those platforms, but it pretty much distributes your data widely to anybody that asks for it.
Hear me out: if you post stuff publicly, it is out there. The issue is data that shouldn’t be public getting public
Fediverse fanboys when they realise that their obscure and socially complex software isn’t know by many people specially outside of the tech bubble, and that it’s not the same experiences that they will get with their known platforms:
As someone who isn’t tech savvy I only joined the fediverse when I had no other choice when Apollo shutdown (except of course going back to Reddit)
Heck when I heard talks of lemmy hearing the word servers was enough to spook me out of joining until last minute
I had a point in here somewhere but I’m so tired i lost it so feel free use your imagination
I know. I’m here and I don’t even know what they’re talking about, much less my friends. I suppose it’s Loop? But a quick search in app store brings up nothing
“I’m protesting American oligarchs and the surveillance state by willingly giving my personal data to Chinese oligarchs and the surveillance state. Lol, get rekt. I am very smart.”
FWIW Pixelfed’s been growing like crazy the last couple days
Source: https://pixelfed.fediverse.observer/dailystats
edit: loops has a much smaller userbase but has also gained active users in the last couple days: https://loops.fediverse.observer/dailystats
Not the first on the app store, unfortunately…
I understand people arguing that a lot of advocacy work is on tiktok, hence it is important; but I really wish good people can advocate on good platforms, instead of monopolistic data-hungry tech oligarchs.
I know we are all on here because we dislike the kind of algorithms that tik tok, Instagram, and Facebook have, but that is exactly the thing my wife was looking for. When I had her download pixelfed and loops she was like ’ I have to search out content and manually follow people like I did with Facebook back in the day?’ and she uninstalled.
Algorithms can be addictive and evil, but for some people that’s what they’re looking for.
Okay, well I have impulses to go and get drunk, do hard drugs, and attempt to sleep with random women. None of those things are close to a good idea for me.
Just because you feel drawn to something or a type of thing does not make it healthy or a good idea for that person. Taking desires and expressing them in a healthy way is important, desires dont just disappear.
It’s fascinating how Lemmy users view internet consumption habits as a reflection of personal ethics. You can’t always hold other people to the standards you’ve achieved. Using and navigating Lemmy takes effort insight that the majority just don’t have. Being alive also takes effort and can be very painful. Sometimes people just need to be able to turn off and zone out. Try not to place value judgements on the ways that other people do that.
We aren’t smarter for being here, we just are loners who didnt care who would be here. I think its important for everyone to open up more to strangers especially in multinational spaces. We saw a lot of interesting conversation for the brief time people moved from tiktok to rednote, and that type of stuff dispels misinformation better than anything. You are treating it as a personal thing but it is a social tool for a community.
The fediverse and the decentralised web has a long way to go and need to learn a thing or two about UX unless it wants to join the plight of Linux distros.
Ptime example:
I do find it kinda funny that that the US gov. Was using “CCP propaganda” as an excuse to ban a platform of expression, and now many of those users have begun using an app that actually has a history of defending the CCP
I don’t want TikTokers on the Fediverse, thankyouverymuch.
“I don’t want AOLers on the web. The open internet should just be for us enlightened few”
JFC, * don’t want you pricks on the fedi. Can’t you go back to BBSes or something and wank each other there?
you can defederate with groups but gatekeeping the entire fediverse feels wrong
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They want a platform that isn’t controlled by oligarchs yet they go to a platform that is controlled by the CCP, interesting
I mean the CCP isn’t an oligarchy; it’s an old school dictatorship.
You have been site-banned from .ml
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Removed by mod
TikTok doesn’t want the data of the average person becaue they aren’t valuable in any way.
TikTok is being blocked because they can manipulate their algorithm to feed influencers to them that push pro-Chinese stances.
Imagine a hypothetical hot war between the US and China where China is telling a significant number of the US population what to think. I specifically say it that way becaue I don’t believe any US company has a significant user base is China.
It could be that sorta thing, but I think it was the same aim as the “salt typhoon” attack on U.S telecomms corpos.
A majority of the vulnerabilities and data dumps are, yes, worthless, but somewhere there’s dumb U.S officials or people with clearances doom-scrolling TikTok , and their data or meta-data is giving valuable insight into how they can be manipulated, blackmailed, who they’re connected to, whatever.
What pro Chinese stances?
I feel like I already answered that in the last paragraph.
It’s litterally anything that whitewashes anything the CCP does. Maybe it’s justification for island building in the South China Sea, framing international right of way passages through the same body of water as border incursions, trying to reduce support for weapon sales to Taiwain, or trying to reduce allied responses to an invasion of Taiwan. It could also just be spreading general unrest.
You realize people in USA are constantly bombarded with this kind of propaganda from their local state. Even if what you’re saying was true (it’s not), I don’t think one app from a different state is going to make any difference.
Literally never seen any of that on TikTok. Just Americans doing their thing. In fact, you can actually look up content on TikTok that shows, describes and condemns the atrocities at tiananmen square, and their awful behavior towards Taiwan. And any number of things that shows the chinese government as a bad player. If they were in control, you’d think that sort of thing wouldn’t even be available.
Yeah, it’s seems kinda obvious that the most extreme TikTokphobes have never actually used the app. They think it looks like this:
Imagine a hypothetical hot war between the US and China where China is telling a significant number of the US population what to think.
This sounds like an imaginary situation where it might be ok to ban TikTok, but definitely not like actual reality.
