There is perennial discussion about what fediverse servers (Lemmy or otherwise) to recommend to new users. I have a proposal, perhaps not very original but I haven’t seen it made often.
Let’s just recommend that newbies pick an instance that is located close to them geographically. That’s to say: their country, their region, or (ideally) their town.
Some context. Personally, I am not totally sold on social media, federated or otherwise. The evidence is now pretty clear that it causes major social harms. One way it does this is by fuelling polarization around hot-button national and international debates, at the expense of local issues. Reviving democracy is going to mean boosting communities at a local level. This could be a small way to do that.
If we look at how toxic and racist the local city groups are on Reddit or Facebook, I’m not sure this is a good model. If I’m a black trans woman living in a small town in Mississippi, my local instance might not even be a safe place, for me.
Similarly, I would encourage blind folks to join us at rblind.com rather than a local instance, because a local instance might not take our needs into account: many have captchas, some use inaccessible themes, etc. At rblind.com you can be sure that we won’t deploy an update or configuration change that will break accessibility, because the server admins and moderators are all blind ourselves. But the beauty of federation means that you can talk to everyone else on other instances, so being part of a particular identity group doesn’t limit you to just talking to other members of that group.
Well the solution to living in a toxic locality isn’t just to seclude yourself and stick to non local social networks, things only improve if you try to improve them despite the hostility and resistance, you have to take up space and confront those racists and homophones locally, but at the same time I see no reason to stay away from larger non local platforms that are supportive and help you
Sarcasm: Yup. The black people who were lynched should have just participated in local communities and confronted the KKK! That’ll fix everything!
Anyway, online isn’t the place to take up space and confront people. You do that in person. Online is where you come to get support, encouragement, and resources for the in-person fight. And that doesn’t work if your online profile is also local. For many people, there online participation cannot, and should not, be geographically local. Remember the “good old days” of the local BBS that you had to dial into? Isn’t it interesting that every single documentary full of sepia toned reminiscences about how wonderful those local communities were is entirely created by and featuring old middle-class white dudes? No women, no homosexuals or transsexuals, no people with disabilities, and no ethnic minorities? I wonder why!
Again, speaking from personal experience: blind people had NFBNet, but it wasn’t local. And the local BBS’s had so much ASCII art and other accessibility issues that we couldn’t participate.
And now, on local Reddits and Facebook groups, nobody uses alt text. I guess that’s my fault for not participating in a space that is completely inaccessible to me. I’m the problem with democracy!
Hold on a second.
Black people fought tooth and nail for their freedom and equal rights.
As a US-based person, just no. It is not desirable to host anything here or to trust any US-based service for a number of reasons.
This is a shit take. OP doesn’t know how the internet works. Join any instance that you like, and subscribe to the community that has a topic based on your geographical region.
Maybe I could see country or even general region, but town?? Why would I want to publicly give away my location like that?
Your choice, it’s just a generic recommendation.
That’s exactly my point. Giving away the exact town you live in to strangers on the Internet is not good advice to give people generically.
If the user likes none of the regional instances he/she knows of, should the user recommend things he/she doesn’t like?
Similarly, some instances have more clear-cut niches. If the user finds such an instance to be a good recommendation to someone interested in the fediverse, should he/she avoid it if it’s too far physically from the interested user?
Everyone can do what they like. I just believe we have a small opportunity to strengthen our offline communities, and we should take that opportunity.
There’s only one mexican instance, it uses a whitelist and it fucking federates with grad so… Yeah, out of options.
I’ve been here since the reddit API exodus and I’ve never seen a latinamerican comm in my feed, much less latinamerican spanish posts.
And hosting an instance is not that simple, it requires effort, content, time, some originality and money (even if a little)… And people who want to join, but I’ve seen maybe 1 mexican (who I assume lives in México too) other than me… Because mexicans love being strangled by meta, so there’s little to no incentive into creating a space for us in the fediverse.
There’s only one mexican instance
Join it and make it better.
it uses a whitelist and it fucking federates with grad
Change that fact, or accept it, or use blocking features (which are not lacking).
Sure, these won’t be popular suggestions, but IMO social media should not be just another form of shopping, where we pick exactly what agrees with us best, and annoys us least, and then lock the door to keep everything else out.
Your views here go against the nature of the fediverse. You’re telling people they should go there and be unhappy with their choices. That’s not how the fediverse works.
The fediverse way to to spun up a Mexican server which does have the views and federation people want, and encourage others to join naturally.
Well, if the true nature of the fediverse is to encourage people to silo themselves into echo chambers where they never have to deal with others who don’t already share all their values and opinions - if that’s truly the point of this thing - then yes, apparently I’m wasting my time here. I still hope there’s a better way.
Ah I believe this is the Either/Or logical fallacy.
People not wanting to see hate speech or propaganda does not mean they are in echo chambers. Those are two different things.
It also doesn’t stand with my original statement. Go set up your own instance that is welcoming. That would prove that it’s not an echo chamber and expand the fediverse. Win win from what I see. Let us know when it’s up.
People not wanting to see hate speech or propaganda does not mean they are in echo chambers.
You know that bad guys are now calling your ideas “hate speech” and “propaganda”, right? And they believe it as much as you do. How do you propose to get out of this mess if not by talking?
And I believe this logical fallacy is Moral Equivalence.
We’re not comparing here, I’m not biting on the rage bait. Again, the proposed solution stands. Set up your own instance and prove us all wrong, show us how to make this utopia you promise.
Since when am I proposing a utopia? I’m proposing that people talk to people in their physical communities. Nothing more ambitious than that.
They said why they don’t join there: federation with unsavory instances
Yes and I answered that argument
