Fediverse alternative to Facebook is what's really missing (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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I do a presentation of the Fediverse to my college students and will soon be giving short workshops to organization as well. I realize that a viable, decentralized altenative to Facebook is IMO the biggest missing piece of the puzzle. We need something that offers some kind of central platform for networking, events, groups, etc. For work related stuff I present Nexcloud. Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed and Loops are getting really interesting and working alternative to their counterparts. I believe if we could get a massive movement of people to adopt an FOSS alternative to Facebook, everything else would easily follow. What do you people think, what would you recommend? I haven't tried Friendica yet.

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[-] Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works 16 points 1 week ago

No matter what your opinion on fb is, each time I do my presentation, it's the main thing people ask me for. To my suprise, even my students in their young 20s are using it a lot, and it's the main platform for people over 40. Billion of people uses it everyday so I wouldn't call it has-been. If we could bring even a small percentage of these people to the fedi, it would destabilise the economic model social media is based on. I'm not saying I like fb, I actually never have, but we can't pretend people are over with it.

[-] ExtremeDullard@piefed.social 16 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I suspect a lot of people use Facebook because they've always used Facebook - mostly older folks at this point - and a lot of the younger folks go there because their favorite association / football club / local restaurant / library are there too.

Meaning Facebook's success today is mostly inertia: there's no way any open-source replacement would pull a critical-enough mass of people away from Facebook to fight the inertia and enjoy any meaningful success. I'm pretty sure open-source developers know this and chose something fancier and more exciting to spend their time on.

Creating a Facebook replacement would be about as exciting as creating a Visual Basic replacement: millions of people still use VB, but nobody wants to touch a dying technology.

[-] XiELEd@piefed.social 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I'm pretty much forced to use Facebook and Messenger because of school. Some teachers will grade you only if you upload your work and tag them on Facebook, sometimes you have to repost or like videos because your project is a video and there's a group competition based on those metrics. Messenger is the default mode of communication between students and teachers, as well as a way to contact people for your graded surveys.

[-] DougHolland@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago

I've avoided Facebook for so long, the idea that it's required as part of an 'education system' bewilders me. Wow.

[-] Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 week ago

You have no idea how deep the education system is now into gafam. To study in Quebec now, you absolutly need a cell phone with ms authenticator, teams is basically mandatory, etc. I'm one of the only teacher at my college that cares enough to show use and show foss alternative to my students. For example Moodle is the most powerfull tool a teacher could dream of for grades, quizz, file sharing, assigments, etc. Yet most teachers prefer ms bullshit suite for everything...

[-] Archer@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Awesome that Moodle is still around!

[-] Dreaming_Novaling@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

GroupMe (Microsoft) and Discord isn't required for pure learning purposes, but 99% of clubs at my school use them, so I'd be unable to participate in a lot of shit if I dropped them.

Instead we just get stalked by Canvas for any assignment/classwork related purposes. Oh, and lockdown browser for online tests...

But I could totally believe teachers forcing students to use some shitty app to communicate with students and submit work.

Edit: Not necessarily social media, but AWS exploded today and so Canvas (school learning platform) is down and my classes literally can't do online assignments until it's fixed lol. So yeah dependency on big tech can suck sometimes.