this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
139 points (92.1% liked)
Asklemmy
43826 readers
941 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Google and other companies make it extremely convenient and easy, so you don't need to be technically inclined to use their services and everyone already uses them. Asking someone to join the Fediverse requires them to understand what it is, and deal with the learning curve; if they aren't technically inclined, they are almost certain to refuse, and even many technically capable ones don't care enough.
Signal is a much better compromise; private enough that it isn't creepy to use, and easy enough that anyone who uses WhatsApp can pick up without difficulty or friction. Even then, only a small percentage of the people in my life use it. It is what it is.
You can't force people to care. The vast majority of people never even heard of FOSS, never heard of self-hosting (or even know what hosting is), and don't get me started on the Fediverse... Most people don't care about privacy either; my mother for example is the "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" type.
When you say "they refuse to take part", it puts too much blame on people, you can't expect people to do something that they don't understand or care enough about. It's like if I asked you to come with me to protest against something you've never heard of, but in order to understand what's wrong with it, you need a long lecture and actually pay attention. Corporations spent hundreds of billions on making their services and products really convenient and easy, so they have to screw up really badly to get people to switch.
I don't really blame them for not making a switch; I understand their stance/reasoning. It's just depressing to be the one guy left out, like I don't get to dance with anyone at the party because I don't like the music.
You want them to download a specific app to talk to you while you refuse to download a specific app to talk to them.
Just sit on that for a bit. That’s exactly how they see this. It’s got nothing to do with privacy at all.
I get it, but at the same time, you shouldn't let yourself be bitter about it, or it will soil your interactions with them. Enjoy your IRL interactions with them, and send them an email next time you want to contact them, since email is probably the only ubiquitous federated platform in the world, and it is likely to remain this way for a long time.