I understand your frustration and I, too, thought that blocking went both ways before seeing your post.

If you encounter someone who is harassing you and attacking your reputation without your knowledge and down voting your whole history, you should gather the proof and contact your instances mods. There’s a very good chance they’ll ban them either temporarily or permanently from the instance. Or contact the mods from their instance as well.

Anyway, I hope this helps.

I feel targeted. I commented somewhere last week saying someone should use OpenOffice when I meant LibreOffice.

It’s just old reflexes.

Through legal actions probably. They’ll sue and the volunteers who manage these instances will cave in because they have a mortgage/lease to pay and possibly a family to take care of, etc.

Democorporation

You’re thinking of coops.

I’m thinking of starting a grocery co-op in my neighborhood to provide low cost food to everyone. A co-op is a democratic organization where all its members have av equal say on how to run things and how to manage profits.

It can be a financial institution, a store, a housing complex, etc.

Co-ops are the answer to escape corporations and capitalism.

Good point.

I use Mastodon and Pixelfed mainly. But I also have an account on Friendica and Loops.video, but I rarely use them. And does Matrix count?

Oh and I forgot about Funkwhale for putting your music collection online.

Oh that’s interesting, I didn’t know it had events,

Yeah, same. I tried getting people to switch, but it was like pulling teeth. It’s even worse now, even with all the Meta Zuckerberg Trump bullshit and the obvious privacy problems.

The circles feature was awesome. Could post stuff for specific groups of people. Sometimes your posts aren’t for all your friends to see.

At first Diaspora seemed to propose a good alternative to Facebook ang G+. It has “aspects” which work similarly to circles. And the interface is similar to Facebook’s. However, it didn’t take off as much as anyone would’ve expected.

Now there’s also Friendica which closely resembles Facebook, but it appears limited in functionality. It looks more like a Facebook-UI to the fediverse, like Mastodon is a Twitter-UI to the fediverse. It’s missing the whole “circles/aspects” feature, and we still don’t have the groups feature either, which I think is very useful and much appreciated by Facebook users.

EDIT: Actually I just double checked and it does have circles actually.

This is probably controversial, but Google Plus was better than Facebook in every way.

I understand your point. But, I don’t think anyone here is creating instances in the hopes of collecting money. They’re just trying to keep the internet free (as in speech). And no, it probably doesn’t cost that much for a server with 16k users, but it still costs something and someone is paying for that out of pocket.

We have to understand that we’re at a crossroads right now. Most of the internet is dominated by GAFAM and they control the access to information and how it’s provided. They control the narrative and have a huge bias in favor of unfettered capitalism and fascism. They not only use your own personal information for profit, but hey also benefit from government subsidies paid by taxpayers.

Meanwhile you have a government that’s increasingly cutting funding for almost everything, including important organizations that fund critical open source projects.

If we want a free (as in speech) internet, we have to understand it comes at a cost and we can’t rely on governments to fund these projects. It’s up to us to put our money where our mouth is.

I’m by no means a whale. But, if us little fishes all band together, we can become even bigger than a whale.

Seriously. If this is your main instance, set up monthly donations. Even if it’s just 1$/£/€ or whatever. Times 16k that’s $16,000+/month. I donate to mine every month.

The fediverse is free because someone else is paying for it out of their own pocket. Not because they’re collecting and selling your private data. So do your part. It’s for the greater good and the freedom of the internet.

Well, like all of the fediverse. It’s a bunch of volunteers who run the instances out of pocket. They need donations to keep going.

I know of at least one. The channel is called The Linux Experiment.

@[email protected]

The part where Mastodon is mentioned:

Use platforms and platform features that let you control your experience - Instagram’s ‘Following’ feed, YouTube’s Subscriptions page, Bluesky, Mastodon and RSS feeds

There ya go.

It’s a shame because there are good American businesses that are affected by this. There are companies that I respect. But it is what it is.

Was gonna say that.

I don’t use them or never read their privacy policy so i don’t know. But it’s not because it’s a paid service that company won’t use your data to sell it for more profit. That’s EXTRA profit for them, so why the hell not. And them being based in the US means I already can’t trust them with their poor privacy laws.

Cool. Wish more search engines would do that.

But, as far as Kagi goes, it’s a paid service and it’s an American company. So I won’t be using them.

No offense but, I would’ve posted that on the many Reddit communities instead of this one. We don’t need to be reminded how shitty Reddit is.

Let’s focus on how the fediverse is doing instead.

Hahaha! Yeah