All software should be open source.

Yeah!

Classic: modern policies, prehistoric execution.

I agree there are cases where sensitivity matters, like national security or systems tied to critical infrastructure. But when it comes to publicly funded software developed specifically for government use, the default should be open by principle. Exceptions can exist, but they must be justified — not the other way around. With COTS products like Microsoft Office, it’s different because the government is just a customer, not the owner of the development.

Absolutely!

You probably should not use number of users or amount of content as the deciding factor (that leads to centralization, remember the entire point of federation is to DE-centralize), that said…

The instance list does allow sorting by number of users or number of videos, phijkchu.com has the most users and Videovortex has the most videos.

Wow, you made me think! P.S.: I’m still new here on the Fediverse.

I don’t. It’s bad enough that people spend too much time on social media. Why the fuck would i introduce another one?

I’m practically only here because rif died. Its not because it’s enjoyable. I open the app to maybe see one good post among the thousands and thousands of “same”-posts.

You made me think.

Lmao, exactly me!

“Its not filled with wankers and bots yet though so its got that going for it.”

hahaha I use Arch, btw

Before anything, I would check if there is an active community they are actually interested in, and give them that. Otherwise, there’s really not much reason why they should use it. It would be like gifting someone a box full of manga to someone who is not interested in Japanese stuff. I’m saying this because a lot of people including OP seems to think decentralisation/federation/FOSSness are some major selling points to a lot of people, but it really isn’t. Content usually is.

It even applies to you too. If an instance banned you for mentioning Linux or FOSS, you wouldn’t really care that they were running open-source Lemmy, you would ditch that instance. If that happened with every instance, you wouldn’t use Lemmy at all.

Now you made me think man!

I normally just say, “I read [x] on Lemmy.”

If they ask and are genuinely curious what that is, I tell them it’s like a reddit offshoot, but the users control the network and servers with a high level of transparency in administration/moderation and run off software that can have tens of thousands of crowdsourced eyes helping to find and fix any bug or security issue.

interesting!

I don’t, because they’ll ruin it.

lmao

exactly!

This is how I do it.

Brief

Imagine if there were 5 clones of twitter, all owned by different companies, but they could all still talk to each other.

So, a person from Twitter could talk to people from threads and bluesky.

Why do it this way?

Each twitter clone could have its own quirks. Like one could have a dislike button where as the rest won’t.
If one of the clone owners decides to become a nazi, we can just migrate to another clone.
This makes sure power is not concentrated in one place!
If the system is open source, you can even start your own version of twitter where you rule!

Don’t care about talking to people on twitter!

But you say “I don’t want to have to talk to people from Twitter!”. Well, doing it this way allows you to choose not to do so. (There’s an option to block clones you don’t like!)

What is fediverse?

It’s the network through which all these different but similar apps can talk to each other.

Social media formats like reddit, twitter and Instagram have been replicated for fediverse and available for people to join or create their own version.

Lemmy is a fediverse alternative for reddit, there are 100s of lemmy apps that can talk to each other (or choose not to if they don’t want to).
Mastadon is alternative for twitter.
And there are more.

To get them to join

Join the biggest instance or join any instance! You can figure out what you want specifically later, easy migration allows that!

But if you want You can read about them before joining: Each is focused on different things like privacy, literature, tech, and even gaming.

Fun Extra

Unlike with instagram and twitter and reddit, fediverse apps like mastadon and lemmy can theoretically talk to each other. So you will be able to see your “tweets” with your “reddit feed”.

Notes

Emphasize pain points and incentives like:

being banned for no reason
free speech
safe spaces
like minded people
Tighter knit communities
Decentralisation, if they’re into some form of socialism or left leaning ideologies.

awesome man, thanks a lot!

The whole thing with federating is irrelevant to most users.

I tell them it’s a social media built in a way that makes it impossible for any company to take over it in order to make profit. And then I show them to some instance I’ve hand-picked for them, without really telling them there are other instances as well. It’s not something they should worry about at that point. I can explain it later on, anyway. interesting!