In the end I don’t think internet users in rich powerful countries are the users most likely to benefit and invest their time into in the fediverse. They might be the ones with the most free time, money and privilege around computers which makes being on the leading edge of niche technologies far easier, but I don’t think using the fediverse vs commercial social media is thattt crucial of a difference for most (add a million qualifiers here except if you are black, queer, trans etc… I am talking in relative terms here) livimg inside the borders of colonial powers like the US, France, Germany etc…
Speaking as a hetero white dude who grew up with a decent amount of privilege the fediverse isn’t for the countless versions of me living within the borders of colonial powers…
It might have been programmers living within the borders of colonial powers that did most of the labor to create the fediverse, and most of the early users might have come from within colonial powers but I think it is important to recognize that the gift that the fediverse represents to the world is the capacity to empower people living outside the borders of colonial powers to own and run their own social networks instead of having some random Facebook employee who doesn’t have the time or basic knowledge of a country to make major decisions about what news accounts to moderate as dangerous spam and what to allow.
From a 30,000 foot view, speaking in broad terms and specific values and priorities, what do you think are the best strategies for flipping the script on the fediverse being mostly a tool used by people within the borders of colonial powers to one used by without and within?
I wonder about the capacities of fediverse software being useful as a compliment to HOT open street mapping type initiatives in the wake of disasters and just in general?
(Are server costs just generally cheaper/easier in colonial countries to run or is it purely a money and time thing? I don’t really know)
its about mature infrastructure.
small, less mature countries have shit for internet resources.
What do you mean in as precise of terms as you are capable of by the term “mature” in this context?
I think the answer to that question is similar to the answer to my original question.
a mature infrastructure… redundant fiber optic/satellite connectivity to Tier 1 providers, power generation and reliability, etc.
basic shit
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:
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 passionThat’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.
I think GDP in this case, but yeah, same idea. It makes sense that wealthy countries with good infrastructure are going to be high on the list.
Country (nominal GDP rank)
USA (1)
France (7)
Germany (4)
Japan (3)
Finland (47)
Canada (9)
Netherlands (18)
Russia (8)
UK (6)High-GDP countries that are notably missing are China (2, users are limited by the Great Firewall) and India (5, still building their infrastructure).
I wonder why Finland is so high on the list? Good for them, regardless.
Things you can do in finland: tango, fight with knives, computer stuff.
China entered the chat
ok fair state probs won’t allow it idk?
India entered the chat
Hell fucking just Mexico City and the surrounding metro/megalopolis not even including the rest of Mexico entered the chat
just a casual 32mil
Sao Paulo is here representing the rest of Brazil but the rest of Brazil couldn’t fit into the chat
Regarding specifically Brazil, I can answer that.
The most used pieces of Fediverse software are for microblogging (Mastodon, Misskey) and forum discussion (Lemmy). But when you look at the statistics for usage of social media platforms in Brazil, here’s what it shows:
YouTube (89%), Instagram (85%), Facebook (84%), TikTok (49%), Pinterest (37%), Twitter (36%), Linkedin (35%), Snapchat (15%), Twitch (9%), Reddit (6%), Tumblr (5%), Hello (3%), Flickr (2%), Quora (2%), WeChat (2%), MeWe (1%), others (7%).
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.
YouTube (89%), Instagram (85%), Facebook (84%), TikTok (49%), Pinterest (37%), Twitter (36%), Linkedin (35%), Snapchat (15%), Twitch (9%), Reddit (6%), Tumblr (5%), Hello (3%), Flickr (2%), Quora (2%), WeChat (2%), MeWe (1%), others (7%).
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.
The leaders of countries such as the PRC, Modi’s India, Putin’s Russia, ans Iran might not like the idea of decentralization.
Indeed, they might not like the internet itself.
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?
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).
You don’t have to use a local server though.
True!
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.
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 ;)
I think it is definitely something to be proud of! It really speaks to France’s long (of course complicated) history with leftism.
the US
France
So, not sure what you mean by this
So, not sure what you mean by this
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???).
Yeah, fuck those colonists with their colonial powers! 💪
Dude.
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.
Yeah… those leeches from underdeveloped countries should be hosting fediverse servers with all that expendable income they have.
What a shit take.
Cry about it
Please refrain from low effort derisive responses like this when people are having an adult conversation you don’t like, it is childish and makes you look like a fool.
Cry about it
