Ya know, take a moment to look around. Think about yourself a year ago, 5 years ago, 10 years ago. What were your biggest problems then? What are your biggest problems now?
My hope is that you have better problems now than you did back then. I also hope you are doing some things now that you only dreamed of back then. I hope you had the courage and opportunity to make the moves you used to be terrified of.
The thing with success, is that it’s not the top of some mountain. It’s this elusive thing that keeps you dreaming for more and more, because you don’t just stop dreaming if you “attain” success.
“When you take a moment to accept things as they are, you don’t need to hope anymore because you realize where you are is kind of okay.”
Please point to where I insinuated this? If people living outside the borders of colonial powers want to host their own servers great, if they want to join US, French, Japanese etc… servers then… also awesome! How on earth are you taking from my read that the point of this line of questioning is to criticize underdeveloped countries or the people that live within their borders?
the whole point of this post is to ask about what ways we can best practically help those people without perpetuating the same structural power imbalances that got us into the present day problems and suffering we face
If you had interacted with my post in a genuine way you would have realized an essential part of my question is how best to help propagate the fediverse outside of its narrow niches, do you build fediverse servers in your own country and make them friendly to foreign users? Do you try to create resources and gather money to help people in those countries just host their own fediverse server?
What are the practical real world advantages and pitfalls of both strategies with respect to the fediverse in particular?
I think I responded to the tone and then you see premise that insinuated that colonial oppressors are just using their advantage to once again oppress the poor indigenous people of wherever in yet another way. Which I don’t agree with.
The concept of the fediverse seems to be that admins host instances and are pretty welcoming to new communities… So if someone from I dunno Togo would setup a lomé or togo-politics community it would be supported. Meaning anyone from anywhere can use the infra provided to setup and moderate their communities.
If anything the system allows people more advantaged with resources (time, money, know how) to provide an open space that can be used by everyone (within reason). Without being beholden to big tech and her hidden profit driven agenda.
I would be more concerned about accessibility and usability from the perspective of a lot of people. As many countries that are still developing have limited time and access. And I don’t know if the current state of the fediverse in it’s development is of much help.
I’llIncreasing the usability of the whole ecosystem with improved clients, moderation tools etc (the stuff that fediverse users are requesting, and those devs are working on) will help.
Once it is mature, more will come. And like with tech, financed by early adopters this seems similar.
In the mean time I see people from all over the globe post stuff about many things, including national interest stuff that would otherwise have passed me by.
And I don’t see stuff posted in languages I don’t comprehend because my profile filteres them out. I don’t know if there are any Swahili/Papiamento/Mandarin/Indonesian posts on lemmy, but Lemmy supports many languages so that might be a thing.
Lastly the whole us vs them (colonial powers, oppressors etc etc) might be applicable to a lot of the world, however, garnering support for a cause by making accusations against the fediverse and the current generation of hosts and users does not help. I would advise a more constructive stance in general. If you see people actually being as you describe call them out and tell it like it is by all means, but this was not the way to get the ball rolling.
I’d probably gone with something like: the fediverse is growing, how can we help it develop in a direction better serving people in developing countries. To get them out from under the power hold and monopolies of the big tech conglomerates. … or something.
In that case I would have stuck with an answer like above… we need to foster and nurture it’s growth so it becomes a good alternative and the people will come. Plus… you know… ask people from these countries or maybe even get devs from there involved using stuff like patreon. Getting feedback from people not using your product… and finding out why they don’t is hard.
But Lemmy for example already did a solid by making sure the platform supports a looooot or languages “out of the box”.
Hope that’s better :).
For the record, I did not downvotes your reply as it deserves an actual response.
Lastly the whole us vs them (colonial powers, oppressors etc etc) might be applicable to a lot of the world, however, garnering support for a cause by making accusations against the fediverse and the current generation of hosts and users does not help. I would advise a more constructive stance in general. If you see people actually being as you describe call them out and tell it like it is by all means, but this was not the way to get the ball rolling.
I am a random fool with an internet connection, I have no power to define anything, and on the contrary I think the only way to get us on the same page is to just came out and say it how it is.
I m happy that France is just behind the USA knowing that we are way less massive in number of people. I think that s cool , let democratize the fediverse nom Mather where you are ;)
What about the usage demographics within each country?
In underdeveloped/exploited countries, internet usage is more likely to be concentrated among the economic elites who formerly benefited from colonialism—so if increasing adoption in those countries just follows the pattern of other internet use, it could have the opposite effect from the one intended.
Yeah that is what makes this shit so exhausting, at every step where you solve the immediate expression of a systematic problem you have to step back, evaluate your solution and shake your head at how clearly your biases tried to recreate the same problem in your solution.
I agree that we should always be asking questions like you are because this could easily be a future timeline the fediverse goes down.
How do you think we can reduce the chance of this happening?
Also, the interface between the oppressors and the oppressed is always multidimensional and unbelievably manifold. The daughters of ultra powerful oppressors funnel money to the oppressed in shades of moral complexities that are difficult to pin down as righteous or not. This is the way history has always been, what matters is the results, and how much members of the ruling class are willing to betray their class for the greater good of humanity shrugs.
I think you’re overthinking this, and extrapolating limited data way too far.
For one, of course historically rich countries are going to be hosting more technology. Tech is expensive, and less developed countries are called that because they’re less developed, which includes electricity grids, internet, economic power, and so on.
Another issue is that just because a Mastodon server is hosted in a particular country, doesn’t mean only people in or from that country can make an account there. Sure, there are some servers that want to keep their communities specific to their local area, but the vast majority have no restrictions. Anyone from anywhere can sign up.
If you’re trying to figure out how to make it so historically poor countries have the most servers instead, you’re going to have to figure out how to fund and manage infrastructure expansion.
It feels like you’re coming at this with the assumption of “every country has the resources to spin up hundreds of social media servers, but they’re just not interested”, which is kind of a weird conclusion to come to after recognizing the historical impact of colonialism and the privilege differences it’s led to.
It feels like you’re coming at this with the assumption of “every country has the resources to spin up hundreds of social media servers, but they’re just not interested”, which is kind of a weird conclusion to come to after recognizing the historical impact of colonialism and the privilege differences it’s led to.
Do you realize how your rhetoric is boxing my opposing viewpoint into being an oversimplification? Nowhere in my language did I imply this was a simple question with a simple answer nor did I request a precise answer of any type.
I acknowledge all of your criticisms, this is a difficult question and I would welcome your input and knowledge if it is along a positive axis not a condescending one that attempts to frame my question as naive and thus fundamentally unserious (independent of whether the details are right or wrong).
My intention was to make it clear that my reference to these numbers was back of the envelope, I know there is a huge amount of complexity to this question.
Do you begin solving physics problem by making sure you start from answering the most complicated version of a problem including simulations of every single little expression of friction and wind resistance etc…. No you say the cow can be abstracted as a sphere and start from there. The question isn’t whether to abstract the cow or not, it is over the quality and consequences of the abstraction.
With that in mind, yes I do think it is worth asking the question of whether the best path forward is for fediverse servers within colonial borders to build open communities that users from without colonial borders can join and use or whether the better path forward is to instead directly help build local fediverse instances hosted outside of colonial borders. I don’t know, it is a massively difficult question to answer, I guess I should keep repeating that so people don’t keep assuming I am naively thinking this is a simple question and I have absolutist all or nothing views of things.
Nothing, do you honestly think I am watching what is happening right now in the US (where I live) and NOT thinking it is utterly terrifying?
Yeah the manufactured hysteria around TikTok doing the same shit western social media companies do is pathetic and absurd (and like, if republicans are up in arms about manipulation of kids, what about tobacco companies???).
looks out my windows the corporate fascist hellscape of the US
Ommm yeah I genuinely not saying this to detract from the seriousness of oppression within the countries you are speaking of but…. nobody with real power in the US likes the internet either?
Did you see what Elon Musk did to Twitter? It wasn’t less a business acquisition than a public execution of an entity that subverted the ability of state sponsored propaganda to be effective all over the world (including specifically… Saudi Arabia and the countries it has business interests in). I mean I don’t know if Elon knows this or not, I really don’t care. The people that gave him the money to pay for the execution on the other hand I am more convinced knew exactly what the general impact of their “investment” was going to be.
What I find quite annoying is how people created these monopolies.
50 years ago, there were 3 (arguably 4) American car companies—still a de facto oligopoly, but 3 is better than 1. The Japanese and VW added to it.
Today we essentially have one search portal, Google; one social network site, Facebook; one video-hosting site, YouTube; and one micro-blogging site, Twitter/X.
If people spent perhaps 1/10th of their micro-blogging time on other sites, Twitter might not have been as attractive to Musk and his backers, but they chose ease over choice, and now they’re wailing over what he’s doing with it.
I’m off-topic.
I mostly agree with your statement. Maybe Amazon likes the internet, but probably most others in big business in the US don’t: it might account a bit for the shitty websites of many of them.
There are obviously a million reasons for this, greed and corruption being obvious touchstones but I also think culturally we weren’t raised to think this state of affairs was grotesque.
A lot just comes down to how people perceive the fediverse, is it just an alternative, another tool you can use that works just as well as corporate social media (lots of handwaving here) or is it a niche community for specific subsections of tech-ish nerds that becomes successfully codified as a tertiary, unimportant place by pop culture?
In terms of internet infrastructure, I think the biggest opportunities here are local grassroots municipal/community government spearheaded build outs of high speed internet that completely bypass the concept of the western business and foreign aid structure that involves pulling in some for profit or “”“non-profit”“”" company with a complex set of incentives that mostly don’t align with the communities they are ostensibly there to help build infrastructure for.
I suspect how effective or ineffective globally this method of funding internet infrastructure development is will have a major impact on the long term future of the fediverse as a whole… since it isn’t within the borders of colonial powers where the inherent freedoms to the internet will be defended. It will ultimately be the “periphery” states and states far beyond the borders of colonial powers that shore up safe heavens for internet communities. Seeing where the US is going, I can only hope that my country will not block my access to those communities down the road…
I worked with and still know people living in Africa, let me tell you, if you think you have bad, expensive internet, go back a decade or two. The people I know work in tech companies or are otherwise somewhat affluent and even they struggle getting a stable internet connection to have a video call. An office building of an ex-coworker had a single 20Mbit line with multiple companies inside.
The people I know have to make due with 1-2Mbit home lines. The cell connections are better, but only marginally.
A former employer even worked with the governments of some African countries and they couldn’t get a datacenter up and running. People were stealing the bricks and wires! The government was trying to move their infrastructure away from the previous colonizers and back home, but their own countrymen and women didn’t understand the importance.
Also, it’s not only internet infrastructure, but infrastructure in general is messed up there. South Africa is one of the wealthiest countries in Africa and has (had?) to content with rolling blackouts for years! Service operators struggle to keep their services running and have to move them abroad, which of course isn’t great.
The reasons are diverse, but a large factor by far is corruption. Physical colonization with non-native governments are a thing of the past. What’s trendy now is economic and legal colonization. Pay off as many people as possible to make laws (and also keep it that way) allowing all the riches (labor and resources) to be extracted from the country at laughable prices - which end up in the pockets of the wealthy and corrupt. Anybody who doesn’t fall in line is merc’ed.
Boeing killed off a whistleblower or two and the government exiled another? That’s cute! Politicians get shot while campaigning for a better future. The press isn’t free, and fair voting circumstances are a dream. Controlling parties can own the voting booths and reward voters in broad daylight for checking the “right” box.
Anyway, while I do support the thought behind asking the question, IMO the only ways to expand the fediverse into ex-colonies are:
making the fediverse so popular that it’s “so hot right now” and the trend swaps over
paying a trusted party to set up a server there and pay for everything (including bribes) to have a stable connection, then tell as many locals as possible
going there, doing it yourself, teaching about it, and handing over the reigns to somebody there with the same vision and passion
That’s of course if the circumstances are right for people there to even want it. Many foreigners have “gone down there” to “show 'em how it’s done” without understanding zilch about their culture, needs, wants, and modus operandi. Only to leave a “white elephant” behind.
Anyway, while I do support the thought behind asking the question, IMO the only ways to expand the fediverse into ex-colonies are:
<span style="color:#323232;">making the fediverse so popular that it’s “so hot right now” and the trend swaps over
</span><span style="color:#323232;">paying a trusted party to set up a server there and pay for everything (including bribes) to have a stable connection, then tell as many locals as possible
</span><span style="color:#323232;">going there, doing it yourself, teaching about it, and handing over the reigns to somebody there with the same vision and passion
</span>
That’s of course if the circumstances are right for people there to even want it. Many foreigners have “gone down there” to “show 'em how it’s done” without understanding zilch about their culture, needs, wants, and modus operandi. Only to leave a “white elephant” behind.
There is no set of “only” that can be defined here. There are a million ways to contribute to a momentum in a positive direction here. The biggest is probably contributing labor for translation of documentation into languages that nobody has bothered to translate for yet right? Another is making sure the development community isn’t an opaque discord clique where asking naive questions gets you immediately harassed for not using discord’s awful search function and that somebody from a very different life experience, culture and language can hack together what your documentation means even if they can’t speak your language.
I think there are as many solutions to this power imbalance as there are dimensions of the power imbalance.
Yeah, you’re probably right. I was thinking in terms of “fediverse is popular in ex-colonies now!” level. But small steps first. Getting off of goddamn discord is definitely one.
Supporting other languages in the dev community is hard though. In my mind it kinda creates a split in the community, so one would need members that speak both languages well and glue the communities together.
Maybe a good step would be hosting per country instances and trying to promote them on proprietary social media.
Supporting other languages in the dev community is hard though. In my mind it kinda creates a split in the community, so one would need members that speak both languages well and glue the communities together.
I think this is a bulk of the hard work that most people in a similar position to me can do (though I only know english and a littttle bit of spanish, but I am referencing my perspective not my life skills). It is hard work, it takes constant people skills and people management. However, I also think the product of that work will undoubtedly have a force multiplication effect on the future growth of the fediverse to more diverse contexts, communities and languages.
As a thought experiment, lets dial this line of thought all the way up to 11. The fediverse would be perfect for hosting say a mastodon instance where all the communication is in a particular endangered language. The community could begin as a place to use an endangered language in conversation, and thus a great place to read and learn the language as well. It could also be a hub for information about classes and events related to the language as well. I believe there is already an Esperanto lemmy community on the fediverse, which is something along vaguely similar lines. Think about it, if somebody with the knowledge, time and skill to set up a lemmy or mastodon instance contacted a teacher conducting classes for an endangered language and offered to set up a community on their lemmy/mastodon server (or help set one up with the intention of handing over control eventually to people in that language community) wouldn’t the result be in many ways simpler from that language teachers perspective than trying to hack something together with commercial software? I think along many metrics it would.
Sure, a companies product for that would be slicker but what about custom character support for languages, what about autocorrect for that language built into the lemmy/mastodon server, what about specific features that are critical to the nature of the language, what about moderation policies that take into account the current and historical experience of the people who kept the language alive? Is a massive corporation run by a bunch of astronomically naive techbros mostly from california really going to care about meaningfully prioritizing implementing features for niche communities like this? …maybe sometimes??
I am disappointed people immediately attacked the details of my question, and focused mostly on the difficulties of constructing any kind of answer that meaningfully predicts the future of an incredibly complex intersection of variables… instead of taking my invitation to think broadly about the future of the fediverse and what the biggest, more direct actions that we can all take to help it grow and become more diverse.
I see where you’re coming from and I like the idea of using the fediverse for endangered languages! Providing a forum (lemmy/mbin), audio platform (funkwhale), video platform (peertube), and short form blogging (mastodon or on of the the others) + long form blogging (wordpress? pleroma? …), could help keep the languages alive through engagement.
Maybe somebody will the find the time for that. I unfortunately am working on other stuff rn.
I am disappointed people immediately attacked the details of my question, and focused mostly on the difficulties of constructing any kind of answer that meaningfully predicts the future of an incredibly complex intersection of variables… instead of taking my invitation to think broadly about the future of the fediverse and what the biggest, more direct actions that we can all take to help it grow and become more diverse.
IMO you should’ve led with the question, then provided context. The context was too long to read to get to the actual question.
IMO you should’ve led with the question, then provided context. The context was too long to read to get to the actual question.
Hey, thanks for the response and honestly that is a great point. I can’t be upset at people for wanting a sentence to end in a reasonable amount of time lol.
small, less mature countries have shit for internet resources.
Isn’t US internet memetically bad (in particular the rural one) compared to a “shit country” like Chile, one of the ones the US got paid to sabotage with military dictatorships?
Our data centers and backbone internet/Tier 1 internet providers are basically the best in the world. The US Department of Energy maintains a network with 46 Tbit/s connections between its labs.
Yes but I admire OP’s optimism in challenging the Fediverse to somehow deploy probably the largest and most complex human endeavor ever conceived to quickly achieve economic parity between non and former-colonial powers. That’s like the Principality of Sealand saying they’re putting a man on the moon. I love it.
Neither microblogging nor forum discussion are popular in Brazil; the top contenders are video services (YT, TT), and the Meta cancer tendrils (IG, FB) behaving as Orkut replacement goldfish. So the main Fediverse services are alternatives for things that, locally, are not overly common to begin with, when people have their “motherfucking caramel” doing funny shit they beeline for TT or FB.
Another factor that I think that reduces Fediverse usage in Brazil is Anglocentrism. Brazilians are mostly monolingual; the exceptions are typically 1) from a colonial background, or 2) highly educated, and only (2) applies here. For most people in Brazil, English content is the same as nothing, or as “the skwerlficashun! throovy! afdsjkfdsa!”.
That backtracks into your OP. I believe that Fediverse success requires
diversification of the platforms widely used and available in the Fediverse
better ways to handle language that reduce the “I don’t speak it so it’s noise” issue
Even with that in mind my city has a Mastodon server. I often lurk there because I’m a verbose fuck, not suited for microblogging; but it’s comfy.
Yeah interesting, so a big question for Brazil is how good youtube and instagram fediverse alternatives are. I Imagine the numbers aren’t tooo different from the US but I don’t think youtube is the the most widely used social network is it? Facebook use is crazy high too unless the numbers are deceiving (I still technically have a facebook account, I haven’t used it in years though).
A big actionable item here is “Does Peertube have documentation in Portuguese?”. Is it any good or is it just thrown through a translator and spit out?
I DO NOT ask these questions from an energy of “hey yall, why is no one bothering to do this??”. I know this kind of thing takes an immense amount of work and most of us are so exhausted by our day job that yeah we would love to do more but…
I am just posing these questions because I think it is good to identify the low hanging fruit in terms of creating potential for fediverse growth. I am not ordering people to lead a horse to water, I also don’t believe in trying to lead a horse to water, but speaking as a horse, if you make it easier for me to drink water I will probably be more likely to drink water… if that makes sense.
Edit: it looks like Peertube has Portuguese language support but idk if the documentation is actually translated into Portuguese or whether it just means that Peertube can run spellcheck on Portugeuse etc…
Double Edit: Hell yeah Peertube looks like it is pretty friendly to a Portugeuse speaking person interested in finding an instance
The source is a bit vague in this regard, but I interpreted those numbers as being the proportion of users of that platform among the 159M daily users in 2021. (For reference the total population was 214M.) So it refers to active usage, but not of the whole population.
I don’t have data for USA, but based on Orkut times I predict that they’ll vary quite a bit. (Orkut was insanely popular in Brazil, but IIRC not in USA.) And overall what I see here for Brazilians is a heavier tendency to consume [audio]visual content, in detriment of text; and yet the later is where the Fediverse is its strongest.
Regarding YT and IG Fediverse alternatives, those would be Peertube (3.4%) and PixelFed (2.4%); globally they’re a bit less used than Lemmy (3.8%), but the bulk of the Fediverse is still microblogging (Mastodon at 72%, Misskey at 8%). So if my reasoning is correct those would need to grow quite a bit, before attracting Latin American users. Or the development of local alternatives that are then “plugged” into the Fediverse, but they would need to have some killer feature.
Regarding YT and IG Fediverse alternatives, those would be Peertube (3.4%) and PixelFed (2.4%); globally they’re a bit less used than Lemmy (3.8%), but the bulk of the Fediverse is still microblogging (Mastodon at 72%, Misskey at 8%). So if my reasoning is correct those would need to grow quite a bit, before attracting Latin American users. Or the development of local alternatives that are then “plugged” into the Fediverse, but they would need to have some killer feature.
Yeah and this is a really good thing to talk about publicly like this. It isn’t my place as a USian to try to force my silly favorite social media network on Brazilians like some kind of unpaid advertisement salesman, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth thinking about world population centers and what kinds of media and communication they value. It changes the context of why development of a tool like peertube is so vital even if it’s usage is still small along any particular metric.
If we focus on making sure the Portuguese translation of documentation for Peertube is at least decent, it sets the stage for something potentially happening organically down the line in Brazilian culture that might lead to Brazilians abruptly valuing and embracing a tool like Peertube.
(I am not using Brazilians as an example for any particular reason here, they are just a useful example of an incredibly sophisticated and populous society that USians tend to pretend doesn’t exist or is a wayward backward place, like São Paulo and Rio are MASSIVE and yet in US culture they are barely blips on the radar).
Documentation available in multiple languages is a good start, but by no means enough. As I replied to another user, what’s hurting the Fediverse penetration in LatAm and other places of the world the most is network effect. Couple that with development being geared towards consumption patterns common in Europe and the northern half of NA and, well, users have even less of an incentive to join in.
Another complicating factor is that video hosting is considerably more expensive than text hosting, so I expect the cost of entry for a PeerTube instance to be considerably higher than the one for a Mastodon instance.
Brazillian here. Out biggest Mastodon instance (ursal.zone) is locally hosted, but is behind Cloudflare and appears as US in this list. Most of Brazilian instances are foreign hosted because of cost. This table means nothing in terms of fediverse penetration on Brazil. We have a huge population, and even as most of Brazilian are monolingual, the minority of bilinguals are millions that can read English. Even monolinguals are doing just fine using Brazilian instances, even if foreign hosted.
Out [Brazilian] biggest Mastodon instance (ursal.zone) is locally hosted, but is behind Cloudflare and appears as US in this list. Most of Brazilian instances are foreign hosted because of cost. This table [the one in the OP] means nothing in terms of fediverse penetration on Brazil.
That’s why I’m not using OP’s data on first place.
With that in mind, look at your own example, ursalzona. Acc. to you, it’s “our biggest Mastodon instance”; it has 500 MAU. For comparison, the biggest Japanese instance has 23k, even if serving a smaller population (126M vs. 215M).
The data might be inaccurate, but OP is correctly highlighting an actual issue - the Fediverse has barely any impact outside a few highly developed countries.
We have a huge population, and even as most of Brazilian are monolingual, the minority of bilinguals are millions that can read English.
More specifically 5%/215M = ~11M. And my point still stands; for 95% of the population, it’s pragmatically the same as if most content in the Fediverse was in Klingon. Here network effect kick us (Fediverse users) on the balls, Merda Meta is so pervasive that people don’t see the point - “I can see caramel dogs being arseholes in Fezesbook, but in Mastodon it’s just a handful of Portuguese speakers, why bother?”
Yeah I should have been very clear to say that I don’t hinge everything I am saying on the fedidb numbers being literally accurate to any metric, of course they won’t be this is a very complex question and fedidb is a volunteer organization tracking a dizzying constellation of volunteer projects.
Like you said, that doesn’t mean the numbers don’t point to something very real and worth talking about however.
I am glad there are far more Portuguese speakers and Brazilians on the fediverse than the numbers appear to show at first glance! Good to hear even if the numbers are still small.
No, I’ve got all that in spades the real problem is that I was raised abusively in a way that actively discouraged agency which severely exacerbated my predisposition towards executive disfunction.
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