It’s so weird, I don’t even notice the lack of ads most of the time (pihole, never leave home, so it’s roughly the same experience I'm used to)

But when I go out? Oh man fediverse is the only site I’ll use because I know it’s safe from ads. The other privacy/user-focus stuff is just a bonus.

(I don’t have any friends around here, so just sort of go out to be out, and usually for food)

I honestly don't think we're there yet.

Remember, something like more than half of all people still don't use an ad-blocker - some people want ads, or at least want that they provide money to keep the service going, and similarly with selling user data (to the extent that people bother to think about it at all).

Never underestimate the level of entitlement thinking on behalf of new users - like, "Which instance do I join? Wait, I have to choose!? Nvm, I'm out already." (and for Mastodon, this has much greater implications than for Lemmy)

Also, one single reply to a comment in chapotraphouse on hexbear.net, followed by a second reply somewhere on Lemmy.ml, almost made me turn away from social media entirely, thinking that this place was fast becoming not really all that different than Reddit after all - I mean, these are leftists, aka liberals, these are/must be my people, right, R-R-RIGHT!?

The Fediverse is not for the uninitiated, and requires significant setup work to even be pleasant much less enjoyable, depending on where you go and the users' innate level of insensitivity.

Though you and many others are working tirelessly to make it better by offering great content - thanks!:-)

For the lowest common denominator social media user, the bar is even lower. As long as everyone else they follow and care about is on the platform, they will happily move. They won’t even care that they will be free from ads and tracking because they never cared in the first place.

I’m doing my part too!

It's what we all loved about the internet I think, before the web become... "that" (looking at the pile of shit the web has become).

But actually it's not the web, not really. It's the big tech platforms that most people seem to think is the internet now. It's sad to watch how people log on to "Facebook" and not the general web anymore. And then Google in front of everything, like a big cancer growth.

Lemmy is not the new internet either I believe. But it's here to show people that something else can exist. As soon as we let advertising in here though, it's over.

Honestly this is great, non-techy people making the transition is a good sign and something the system needs to gain mainstream appeal.

Also, people who aren't techy are less likely to accept hacky workaround BS and complain until it's fixed on a system-wide level, and that's needed to mature the platform to something anyone can use. It's getting there but it's still got a lot of rough edges.

I enjoyed reading this. I came over from reddit when they started banning people for protesting. That showed me that reddit was not what I thought it is.

I‘m a techy person. I run servers for friends and customers, partly with fediverse services on them. Lemmy being one of them. I donate both time and money to lemmy and other services I enjoy and use.

The fediverse is a great thing imo. I hope it succeeds.

Gonna be honest, a lot of times I feel like I don't belong here, I'm still figuring things out.

I left reddit when they fucked over Joey (my preferred reddit app)

Are you me? I thought I was relatively tech-savvy, and then I moved to Lemmy. Also, Joey was the best.

This is what Lemmy is all about, right here. Just a good, honest nutsack taking a simple shit.

Same

I'm in my 20s, is that considered youth?

I'm OP and I'm 50 and female.

Teamwork makes the dream work.

I started to think of Reddit as just an occasional Google search result necessary evil and have successfully ignored it ever since. Log off DKC, there's a better world out there.

In all seriousness I think eventually conventional social media will start to feel very siloed like AOL did as more people join the fediverse. I can't imagine using a site that I couldn't look at everything from anymore, save for stupid ass Facebook which I do solely for sovcit material. Why would I want to look at crap ads and AI when I can be here?

feddit.uk clocks in at under £40/month. That's hosting, and backups. lemmy.zip is similar.

Plus our time, but we're obviously doing it as a labour of love.

Hey, shitposts are like manure that helps other posts grow.

OMG! Thank you so much ❤️❤️❤️

It's not easy keeping things up sometimes, but we're always looking for ways to deliver more for less, while still keeping things snappy.

It's hard, but without the community, we would just be some nerds with too much time on our hands 😅

Much love for y'all!!!

Someone's gotta make toxic sludge!

Yeah, but we've been on this stressful ride before, and we know where it ends.

There were lots of attempts at a closed source proprietary Internet protocol. They have all resoundly failed, after looking unbeatable. Some folks still fondly remember the closed Internet protocols like OLE COM, ActiveX, Flash, Cold Fusion, and SilverLight, but few of us miss them. Okay, I do miss Flash games.

Good touchscreen phone operating systems were a "will this ever be matched?" trade secret at Blackberry and Apple. Now the vast majority of phones run open source Android.

Much earlier, most good-enough C compilers were expensive proprietary closed source products. Now I see very little being compiled on anything other than the free and open source GCC. Even most other programming languages and tools are now FOSS, as well. I can't think of much for development that cracks the top 20 that isn't FOSS. JetBrains IDEs stand out as a lone closed source hold-out.

Open standards always win, in the end.

The desktop computing default is honestly way overdue to switch to FOSS. That's why it's the year of the Linux desktop.

The Fediverse is here to stay, and is all that'll be left in a couple decades. But in the meantime, it's cozy!