Social media sucks. Platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are designed to turn your precious free time into money. What we see as a nice way to stay in touch with our friends, in reality are just many hits of dopamine stimulating precise spots in your brain, leading to you spending more time on the platform consuming ads.
But what if I told you that there is a huge ad-free social network out there, not governed by a central authority, full of great people and completely free to use? This place is called the Fediverse. Well, it's not really a place, it's many places.
See the 6 reasons and a good short overview of what the Fediverse is about at https://slashdev.space/posts/2021-01-18-reasons-the-fediverse-is-better
#technology #opensource #fediverse #alternativeto #privacy
That is Write.as / WriteFreely
The W is WriteFreely; The feather is Plume
I have a friend and she has a WriteFreely instance where she publishes to her um, I'm not sure if it's a Pleroma or Mastodon instance. But anyway, she's also got a WordPress site that is federated.
Well WordPress comes with it's own set of complications due to bloat and performance issues. GTMetrix has disenchanted many a would-be websmith who used some tool like Elementor to create a pretty site that just barely creaks along resulting in SERPs on page 7 of the search engines.
But in Wordpress' defense, if you federate your site and publish, people can respond from Pleroma and Mastodon and it will show up in your comments. That's not the case with write freely, although people can comment and those posts/toots/replies will show up on the respective Fediverse instance where the published article appeared under the account of.
There are a couple of 'sort of' kewl, but kludgey solutions for Jamstacks like Hugo and Jekyll that I've played with a bit, but this requires a couple of things. First, you need to have a Fediverse account on an instance to add a comment to the blog article, and second, it's a little janky, since it's not your instance that you're commenting at so it's a remote post requiring you to login and do a remote post. And it doesn't return you automatically to the original blog site.
One person I know used their own account and fed comments from their blog site through that single role account - still not elegant.
but Things are deifinitely improving by leaps and bounds every single day. Hey, just look at Lemmy, for example :) This is really fricken' kewl :)
And it feels almost just like Hacker News or Reddit too, so no learning curve for new initiates!