I don’t have an opinion either way on this but can we not act like corporate for profit social networks haven’t thunderously dropped the ball on this kind of thing lol

Look I love lemmy/reddit style social networks and I don’t disagree with the shallow reasons for why twitter has a character limit but there are legitimate and interesting reasons for character limits to posts. Is it better? probably not but sometimes less is more.

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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.

Then how do we most effectively fight wealth inequality along the axis of software, fediverse software in particular?

You can’t drop a mean comment like that and not expand on what you specifically mean by it.

What makes my post brain dead then specifically ?

Yeah I should have been very clear to say that I don’t hinge everything I am saying on the fedidb numbers being literally accurate to any metric, of course they won’t be this is a very complex question and fedidb is a volunteer organization tracking a dizzying constellation of volunteer projects.

Like you said, that doesn’t mean the numbers don’t point to something very real and worth talking about however.

I am glad there are far more Portuguese speakers and Brazilians on the fediverse than the numbers appear to show at first glance! Good to hear even if the numbers are still small.

Keep at it, we can work together and find a solution

I would say with -30 votes and 50 comments that I am clearly not part of this “we”

I think I am done participating here

Oh true you could probably get some sick domains for smaller countries not well represented on the internet (not me I mean someone from that country).

Honestly I think cities are cooler though they feel more local and human than country names to me.

I think that is a fair criticism, I appreciate your honesty and straightforwardness!

Nice mix of mental stimulation and high risk hijinks

Lastly the whole us vs them (colonial powers, oppressors etc etc) might be applicable to a lot of the world, however, garnering support for a cause by making accusations against the fediverse and the current generation of hosts and users does not help. I would advise a more constructive stance in general. If you see people actually being as you describe call them out and tell it like it is by all means, but this was not the way to get the ball rolling.

I am a random fool with an internet connection, I have no power to define anything, and on the contrary I think the only way to get us on the same page is to just came out and say it how it is.

Maybe…? As many have reminded me on this thread, be wary of your kneejerk assumptions.

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.

Yeah and this is a really good thing to talk about publicly like this. It isn’t my place as a USian to try to force my silly favorite social media network on Brazilians like some kind of unpaid advertisement salesman, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth thinking about world population centers and what kinds of media and communication they value. It changes the context of why development of a tool like peertube is so vital even if it’s usage is still small along any particular metric.

If we focus on making sure the Portuguese translation of documentation for Peertube is at least decent, it sets the stage for something potentially happening organically down the line in Brazilian culture that might lead to Brazilians abruptly valuing and embracing a tool like Peertube.

(I am not using Brazilians as an example for any particular reason here, they are just a useful example of an incredibly sophisticated and populous society that USians tend to pretend doesn’t exist or is a wayward backward place, like São Paulo and Rio are MASSIVE and yet in US culture they are barely blips on the radar).

Please point to where I insinuated this? If people living outside the borders of colonial powers want to host their own servers great, if they want to join US, French, Japanese etc… servers then… also awesome! How on earth are you taking from my read that the point of this line of questioning is to criticize underdeveloped countries or the people that live within their borders?

the whole point of this post is to ask about what ways we can best practically help those people without perpetuating the same structural power imbalances that got us into the present day problems and suffering we face

If you had interacted with my post in a genuine way you would have realized an essential part of my question is how best to help propagate the fediverse outside of its narrow niches, do you build fediverse servers in your own country and make them friendly to foreign users? Do you try to create resources and gather money to help people in those countries just host their own fediverse server?

What are the practical real world advantages and pitfalls of both strategies with respect to the fediverse in particular?

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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?