A year ago today I made my Lemmy account
I now have a Mastodon, a Pixelfed, a bookwyrm, and a Peertube account. I switched off of most google services to privacy respecting ones. A week ago I bought a laptop to run Linux mint on.
And I couldn’t be happier here’s to another year of the Fediverse!
I’ll have to say that I feel like Lemmy is the biggest success since it replaced Reddit for me almost completely except for Google searches
Congrats! I’m now off to checkout bookwyrm because I haven’t seen that before.
It’s a fun one once you start following people and looking for recommendations from them.
Yeah, good way to track books without having to be part of Amazon’s pipeline.
Though tbh I track most of my book slash other media impressions in a paper notebook. I just like how it feels.
Makes sense. I wish bookwyrm did recommendations based on other people’s recommendations. Or category recommendations maybe?
A lot of our accounts are gonna be 1 year old in similar times. Mine is on 11 June.
Learnt a lot of open source stuff in the meantime!
Mhm it’s just like something happend one year ago… I can’t put my finger on it.
But, nevertheless, fuck spez.
I love the enthusiasm but it’s funny to say posting to a platform that makes copies on other servers and opens up APIs that make it very easy to scrape and build a profile with a little scripting has any privacy.
It’s still better than meta or Twitter but your not private on these platforms. The companies that might make accounts to advertise from can easily be blocked and need to try harder to actually get your attention.
Just be weary AI and ad companies are probably already scraping these platforms and it’s thanks to the open nature and the inherent flaws of modern monolithic social media design.
Privacy can mean different things in different contexts.
Some peoples’ thoughts go first to sharing content with a restricted audience. ActivityPub isn’t good at that since the admins of every server involved can access the content. That’s also true of centralized social media, though sometimes the admins of those services seem farther removed from users’ social lives. E2EE chat like Matrix and Signal are good options for that use case, and there has been work on adding E2EE options to some ActivityPub software.
I usually treat social media as public, so I’m not concerned with restricting access to things I share that way. I am, however concerned about service providers monitoring behavior like how long I spend looking at a particular post, or trying to track my browsing habits on third-party websites. Fediverse projects do not normally include those kinds of behaviors, and it would be scandalous if a service provider added them.
That last part is a huge bonus. It’s creepy how much information the get from watching your consumption habits. Imagion how many times you’ve stopped to look at an ad of something you were interested in just to see if it’s on sail or something.
Not even interacting with the ad they can gauge interest in certain categories let alone the product itself.
This was the plus side for me, too. I couldn’t care less who sees what I post on social media, but (so far) at least my information here isn’t harvested to target ads to me. In fact, I had gotten so used to seeing ads on Reddit and Twitter that I was numb to it. After a year+ here, when I go back to check on those, it’s all I notice and it’s terrible.
The author switched Google services for privacy ones. It was not related to Fediverse activity.
I mean most of those are replacing platforms from meta and Twitter with fediverse based platforms but that’s not the point.
PeerTube on the idea is great but you have to be honest, YouTube is better. So this is what I did in this specific case to fight the bad Google: I registered on a Piped instance to continue watching videos without ads, without trackers, without sponsored passages, etc… and if you have an Apple device there is an app for that, it’s called Yattee.
I have a Mastodon account but honestly like PeerTube I like it on paper but there is only politics, so if you have accounts to recommend me I’m taking.
Otherwise Linux Mint is really special I approve of your choice.
In mastodon it’s not about following accounts but following hashtags instead. So find hashtags that describe your hobbies and your feed will start to become interesting to you.
It’s so hard to find populated hashtags though. I wish there was more discourse on mastodon but it’s just people shouting into the void.
The key is to tag all your posts, so other people can find them. You get followers here and there, but not too often. I never post of Lemmy, but post a ton of stuff on Mastodon. TBH, I mostly doom scroll RSS these days.
Basically Inoreader -> InstaPaper -> Mastodon
