Yes you’re right about that and it should be pointed out. Having to choose a server is unavoidable. Having multiple servers is one of the best features of lemmy and the fediverse. Putting effort in to explaining it in simple terms would help eliminate some of the confusion.

Other than a couple of recommendations for Friendica, it looks like everyone hasn’t bothered to find a replacement that does all the same things.

Friending all your relatives on Facebook was like attending a family reunion that never ends. At first, it was great catching up with everyone you hadn’t been in contact with. Pretty soon after that, Uncle Bert would start on some political rant, Cousin Stan would try to get you to invest in some sketchy startup, and Cousin Sally would go on about a new cult she joined. The same thing would hold for an endless high reunion.

Facebook made sense for its original membership of college students. It was a great way to meet other students. You all had similar goals, experiences, and questions. Once you graduated, you all went your own way.

Social media is in its infancy in regards to how we use it. We’re still learning about what works and what doesn’t. For many of us, Facebook doesn’t, more selective, less overall encompassing communication does. It’s probably why we’re all here on Lemmy and Mastodon.

I have cousins like that.

Perhaps the best fit for the Earthling would be sharing and communicating with close life time friends and family that would have known you your whole life and remember what you said or did in your youth. It would be with them that one would want to share and reminiscence over old times and not people you just met on Beehaw as friendly they might be.

Thanks for the link. That’s almost exactly what I was envisioning. It’s great to see such a project so far along.

I remember following a few rings. There were also website that would allow you to explore other websites.

I agree it would have to be simple to be widely accepted. There would have to be an app to make set up easy. Clearly, self hosting would only be for the most technical of us. I’ve set up a dozen servers on bare metal VPS’s and still have to follow instructions to get it right. For others, the set up app would also support exporting it to a service provider. Even so, it would probably be too much for many people.

That occurred to me as I wrote it. The main difference is the controlled connectivity with other ‘web sites’. There’s also tumblr. I still have a site there, haven’t touched it in years.

Great article. When I came to lemmy/kbin a few weeks ago (I’m an old time now, right), I thought it will become great when most of those on Reddit realize that this is the place to be and come here in droves. That would be greatness. After reading this and thinking about it, I’m fine with the way it is now. There are lots of interesting posts like this one and interesting feedback to them. If anything having several million members in this community would make it worse.

Before writing the post, I thought it could be a good thing. By the time I listed all the drawbacks, I changed my mind. I made the post anyway to see what others thought. Many of you have pointed out even more issues with it. So far, no one has had anything good to say about it. Great feedback.

I agree with you that it isn’t that difficult. I signed up on mastodon.social months ago. It was a little confusing about picking an instance so I just arbitrarily picked one. The same was true for lemmy. Now I’m on lemme.ee and behaw.org.

In the case of Matodon, I recently discovered the Explore option. There’s more than enough posts to keep me reading for hours. And most of them are interesting. Imagine reading an unfiltered Twitter feed. I don’t need Mastodon to get any bigger for my needs. It may even be better if it doesn’t get a huge membership. The same holds true for lemmy and kbin, bigger and better yes, but they don’t have to be a Reddit replacement.

Home Assistant, ESPHome, frigate, grafana, influxdb, mosquitto, nodered, plex, and a few web site servers. Once set up, they’re all easy to manage. The biggest challenge is upgrading Ubuntu on the web severs. All the other ones are Docker instance.

Large corporations regularly buy up small firms to get their product. You may be less tin foil hatty than you think on that one.