Prosody for me. I set it up over 2 years ago, and the only time I touched it was when updating to the latest Debian stable and enabling some new features in the config files. It’s been rock-solid and just worked without complaint.

I’m actually ok with this, if it only applies to the biggest social media companies (10million+ UK users) who have algorithmically ranked content. And it should apply to what gets weighted in the feeds, not whether the content exists on the site at all.

I think big tech companies shouldn’t be held responsible for all user generated content on their site, but they should be held responsible for the content they actively promote via the feeds, if they do so algorithmically. I think this article (from a US perspective) presents a good framework for moderation. The more you are a “dumb pipe”, the less moderation you should have, and the more you actively make user-facing decisions about content, the more oversight and moderation you should have. And, if you are a small provider (like the fediverse 😜) then you should be exempt from these regulations to encourage competition.

We have public service broadcasters who are regulated by Ofcom. It’s not perfect - Ofcom should be strengthened, made more politically independent and should have much more teeth, and they’ve been woeful in dealing with GBeebies - but the regulated public service broadcasters are among the most trusted news providers in the UK.

I’m sympathetic to the idea that any kind of restriction is a slippery slope. And I know the public service broadcasters are not perfect, there are problems of political interference that need to be dealt with, and of course they don’t appeal to everyone. But they are also among the most trusted news outlets?

I’m also sympathetic to the idea that the government is solving this the wrong way round. That they are trying to fix this on the supply side when really it’s a demand problem - people just don’t like the regulated news providers enough so they don’t get promoted by the feeds on social media. But that argument presumes that the tech companies’ feeds are purely responding to consumer demand; social media companies are now mostly owned by people who want to, or are careless about, interfering with our democracy and promoting particular ideologies. So I think the era of trusting that whatever the algorithms promote is just based on what we want is over.

My partner, dad’s partner, and so many colleagues at my job, wasted so many weeks cramming for this stupid, irrelevant test. If you add up all the people who have to take this, how many person hours have we wasted as a society, all to be forgotten anyway, because it’s useless information.

We really need to get rid of this test, or at a minimum strip it down and make it about how to vote and access public services. But even then, if someone wants to learn that, they will of their own accord and in their own time anyway.

67% for me, looks like I’m getting kicked out

Ooooo, someone’s getting worried!

I agree with you, and I think there’s a tension between the technical solution (meeting users where they are) and political solution (persuading the users to come to our way of thinking).

The technical solution is an unequal fight. We have to provide a familiar and equally good experience - integrating everything into these easy-to-use everything apps, on a shoestring budget compared to the proprietary apps. And, without the “education”, users will converge on particular instances because that’s what’s most convenient, giving a lot of power to particular players in the network.

If we can persuade people to prioritise freedom over convenience, then we end up with a much more resilient userbase who will go help with the existing networks.

I don’t know how we can make people care, though. The free software movement has been trying for 40 years to make regular users care, but the message only really lands with developers. There’s certainly more interest in taking down big tech nowadays, but convenience still seems to come first.

Searching for a single Discord alternative may be asking the wrong question however. Discord itself is an extensive bundle of functions smashed together: real-time chat, persistent forums and documentation, voice chats, events and even games. Rather than replicating that bundle in a single app, the open social web may be converging on a different model entirely, where specialised services handle specific functions while sharing identity and social connections across protocol boundaries. These individual services themselves do not have to share the same protocol underneath, and may actually work better if they don’t, with each protocol handling the part it is best designed for.

This is the most interesting part to me. Can users be persuaded to have different expectations from the proprietary apps they’re used to?

Whenever these sudden migrations happen, the alternatives that win seem to be the ones that look and behave as similarly to the proprietary app as possible, as the people switching don’t care about decentralisation, and are much more sensitive to any changes in experience.

I think we need to create separate experiences, backed by the same protocol, for people who care about decentralisation and freedom (and discover the fediverse naturally, outside of these big migrations), and those that show up during the big migrations.

For the first group, we want software that’s easy to self-host, customisable, spreads users between instances, ultimately empowers them to have the exact experience they want. For the second group, we should just copy the exact experience of the proprietary networks as much as the protocol allows.

Of course, the risk is that we get even larger influxes of people who never had to learn the community norms. Is that worth it? - I’m not sure.