Someone on my mastodon instance sent this in regards to federated alternatives.
- Youtube/Vimeo->PeerTube
- Instagram->Pixelfed
- Reddit->Lemmy
- Twitter->Mastodon
- Facebook->Friendica
- Goodreads->BookWyrm
- Twitch->Owncast/PeerTube
- Spotify?->Funkwhale
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Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
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Someone on my mastodon instance sent this in regards to federated alternatives.
And just to add some more detail to this.
For twitter -> mastodon ... there are alternatives beyond mastodon like akkoma, calckey, misskey, pleroma (where akkoma came from). From what I can tell, akkoma is cool, but mostly used for hosting your own single-user or small user-base server, but not exclusively at all (for instance, the linux kernel developers run their own instance for themselves on akkoma ... Linus Torvalds is there and occasionally posts). Calckey is fun and feature rich but also being actively developed.
For Reddit -> Lemmy, there's also kbin, which is newer, took some inspiration from lemmy, but is fusing microblogging with threaded posts, kinda cool and I'd like to see kbin and lemmy grow together.
Pixelfed seems to be doing well with a committed developer and an app and a newly released feature to import your instagram history.
If you're into blogging (remember blogs!?), there are some options too. Lemmy could be used by just starting a community and allowing only moderators to post (this is recommended in the documentation). Otherwise, writefreely and micro.blog provide some platforms while microblog.pub is an interesting platform that you would have to self-host but, if you have the know how, may be pretty suitable for hacking it to your liking (python + sqlite).
For pc I use moosync to listen to music and on phone I use metro
PeerTube as an alt for YouTube. Half the folks I follow on YouTube have a channel on tilvuds.com I've found, so it works for me.
It also has a livestreaming option as well. I'm hoping some twitch streamers would consider; but, that's a longshot because they're upset about ad money not actual content. Unless, there is a way to monetize content hosting without ads that's more or less a pipe dream
Diaspora* is one that's been around for yeeeeears. A federated Facebook basically. I always wished it'd take off since I do like the idea of having a personal page for very close friends and my network but it is much harder to take off because, while reddit and other sites have tech-minded folks willing to learn and migrate, very few people have an entire extended friend group looking to figure out what a decentralized federated Facebook would entail.
The sad truth is that Diaspora pretty much refuses to federate with anything other than itself. Some projects have managed to reverse engineer the protocol, but you'd honestly have more luck with Friendica or Hubzilla. Even then, neither of those things are perfectly analogous to Facebook.
Do they give a reason why they won't?
It's long and complicated, and there are bitter feelings on both sides.
https://discourse.diasporafoundation.org/t/lets-talk-about-activitypub/741
https://overengineer.dev/blog/2018/02/01/activitypub-one-protocol-to-rule-them-all.html
https://overengineer.dev/blog/2019/01/13/activitypub-final-thoughts-one-year-later.html
The thing is, he has some valid points. But, much of the fediverse have pretty much figured out basic interoperability, and now we're moving on towards more complex features in federation. Diaspora has, in my opinion, fallen very much behind everyone else.
@MyopicTopic
> very few people have an entire extended friend group looking to figure out what a decentralized federated Facebook would entail
Indeed. It's a real swiss army knife of a platform, hard to even spec out a replacement. I had a go at that here a few years ago:
I'm sure I wrote out a more developed summary of this as a blog post, but I can't find it right now.
https://fediverse.party/en/miscellaneous/
This is an exhaustive list of all fediverse programs. Seems like theres an alternative for most things, and it just depends on what you like.
Pixelfed as instagram alternative is a big one i guess.
Not realy fedi but somewhat: Matrix as mesenger/discord alternative.
I was just looking at Matrix, are there community servers like on discord people can join? or is it all private rooms?
@lackthought
> I was just looking at Matrix, are there community servers like on discord people can join? or is it all private rooms?
There are loads of public rooms on matrix, eg:
https://matrix.to/#/#fediverse-city:matrix.org
FYI what Discord calls a "server" is actually just a group of chat channels and their pool of members. The equivalent of a Discord "server" on matrix is a "Space". This blog post is a couple of years old out-of-date, but it gives you the general idea:
thanks for the info!
I will read more about it, sounds exciting!
@strypey ist right :) matrix has a equivalent to guilds/servers.
In theory it has same functionality as discord (chat/voice/video/etc) via integration but thats lacking good ui/ux. so right now i would only see it as a chat platform with potential.
Personally I enjoy and use Lemmy, obviously, Mastodon for Twitter of course, Bookwyrm for Goodreads, and WriteFreely for creative authorship.
I'd love to use OwnCast but there's a void of content to enjoy unfortunately :c
@DaisyLee
> What are the best fediverse alternative to the big sites on the web?
Which ones are the best is a matter of taste, but this page gives you an idea which of the corporate DataFarms the various fedi apps can be a replacement for:
https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_are_Fediverse_projects%3F/Fancy
The only other ones I personally use are PixelFed (which is similar to IG) and BookWyrm, which is like GoodReads.
Came to recommend pixelfed. I have not set up bookwyrm yet, is it good?
Hey! I like it pretty well so far, although I admit I exited GoodReads so fast I have nothing to compare against really.
In my opinion: IRC has to be on the list. But I am not your average Joe.
Matrix.org takes IRC a step further and is based on federation.
I used to spend a lot of time on IRC back in the day. The only thing stopping me from using now, is I can’t find a decent IRC client for iPad. The big problem was around multitasking. I would say switch over to my mail app to read a message that just came in, and when I would switch back to the IRC app I would find myself disconnected from the server.
I do remember reading about a web based IRC client that would solve that problem. I was going to set it up in my home server, then got busy and forgot its name.
I've got zero experience with the apple stuff, but I do have experience with home server so maybe there is something here you can use. Essentially, the device in my hands is never the one that's running IRC.
On my home server, I have a tmux session where my IRC client lives and runs 24/7. Then from whatever device I am on, from anywhere, I ssh into my homeserver and connect to the tmux session.
Long live IRC