I know I’ve made the jump to Mastodon, and now lemmy. But what are the other sites that I’m missing out on?
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
Check out this here: https://fediverse.party/en/miscellaneous/
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.
