Overview:
The community to discuss buying European goods and services.
Rules:
Be kind to each other, and argue in good faith. No direct insults nor disrespectful and condescending comments.
Do not use this community to promote Nationalism/Euronationalism. This community is for discussing European products/services and news related to that. For other topics the following might be of interest:
Include a disclaimer at the bottom of the post if you're affiliated with the recommendation.
No russian suggestions.
Feddit.uk's instance rules apply:
Benefits of Buying Local:
local investment, job creation, innovation, increased competition, more redundancy.
European Instances
Lemmy:
Basque Country: https://lemmy.eus/
๐ง๐ช Belgium: https://0d.gs/
๐ง๐ฌ Bulgaria: https://feddit.bg/
Catalonia: https://lemmy.cat/
๐ฉ๐ฐ Denmark, including Greenland (for now): https://feddit.dk/
๐ช๐บ Europe: https://europe.pub/
๐ซ๐ท๐ง๐ช๐จ๐ญ France, Belgium, Switzerland: https://jlai.lu/
๐ฉ๐ช๐ฆ๐น๐จ๐ญ๐ฑ๐ฎ Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Lichtenstein: https://feddit.org/
๐ซ๐ฎ Finland: https://sopuli.xyz/ & https://suppo.fi/
๐ฎ๐ธ Iceland: https://feddit.is/
๐ฎ๐น Italy: https://feddit.it/
๐ฑ๐น Lithuania: https://group.lt/
๐ณ๐ฑ Netherlands: https://feddit.nl/
๐ต๐ฑ Poland: https://fedit.pl/ & https://szmer.info/
๐ต๐น Portugal: https://lemmy.pt/
๐ธ๐ฎ Slovenia: https://gregtech.eu/
๐ธ๐ช Sweden: https://feddit.nu/
๐น๐ท Turkey: https://lemmy.com.tr/
๐ฌ๐ง UK: https://feddit.uk/
Matrix:
๐ฌ๐ง UK: matrix.org & glasgow.social
๐ซ๐ท France: tendomium & imagisphe.re & hadoly.fr
๐ฉ๐ช Germany: tchncs.de, catgirl.cloud, pub.solar, yatrix.org, digitalprivacy.diy, oblak.be, nope.chat, envs.net, hot-chilli.im, synod.im & rollenspiel.chat
๐ณ๐ฑ Netherlands: bark.lgbt
๐ฆ๐น Austria: gemeinsam.jetzt & private.coffee
๐ซ๐ฎ Finland: pikaviestin.fi
Related Communities:
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Stop Publisher Kill Switch in Games Practice:
Banner credits: BYTEAlliance
In my opinion it's not bad to have a diverse landscape with different options. I believe the best course of action for many institutions should be to use both of these options simultaneously. Any organisation with a social media, communications or other type of public relations team should be able to set up a crossposter easily enough.
I still don't understand what inherent appeal Bluesky has. Is it the familiarity? Maybe the delusional belief that corporations are the designated social media providers?
It's easy to use
It's simple kinda - one has a marketing team. Lots of wonders the power of spin and hype can do for you.
It has Democrat toxicity instead of Republican toxicity. And no Elon Musk. Which is like cleaner and often less stupid, sure, but for a european not very relevant.
And something something protocol cool cool much. Compared to Mastodon, it has similar algorithmic feeds that Twitter has, which depending on your viewpoint makes it just as bad as Twitter or just as useful as Twitter. This + lack of masses leads to nothing ever happening in Mastodon, or at least that it seems like it. In contrast, those algorithmic toxic wastelands like Twitter, Bluesky and Facebook especially always have something "new" happening in them. Even if it's just AI slop, the dumb part of your brain gets happy about it.
Particularly considering Facebook (I will die before I call it meta) blocked major Islamic Indians on their platforms as well as the biggest Islamic news outlet in India. Standing up your own instance on mastodon/lemmy/friendica/Pixelfed is the best way to avoid getting shut down by billionaires who kowtow to fascists.
Tbh I have little interest in either of them
I wish fewer people would "appreciate" micro-blogging and short videos in general. It has too much of an influence on public discourse and the short posts aren't really suitable for the complex issues we face today.
I'll say it again and again and again:
The fediverse is hamstrung by the need to choose a specific server.
I remember trying to help people join Mastodon when Musk bought Twitter. Every question I heard was about picking a server.
What's a server?
Why do I have to pick a server?
How do I pick a server?
Then there were the more thoughtful questions.
What happens if the server I chose goes down?
What happens if someone chooses the same user name as mine on a different server?
Mastodon, Lemmy, etc. won't get mainstream traction until someone solves this simple hurdle.
@DemBoSain @Sunshine
I think that a part of the "server hurdle" can be solved - at least for brand new users - by initiatives like the Vivaldi Social network.
New to Vivaldi? Nice - welcome. Would you like to join Mastodon? Register here. Boom.
If people have heard about Mastodon and are curious about it, this is the easy way to get them hooked. No talk about servers or instances - you register and you are off to the races.
How this all plays into the decentralized nature of the Fediverse and who is going to fund those servers is a different question - but it is definitely the easiest gateway for new users (as you can see, I was one of them).
The first time someone told me about mbin/lemmy, I had that exact issue and just gave up on it for a few months. This is especially true as there doesn't really exist any account migration (nor, probably, can there be one without any kind of centralized auth server or the like). I finally did move over, but two of the instances I used just shut down, one with basically no warning.
I keep hammering home: instance doesn't matter when you start. It's more important for you to join. Once you join, you'll figure out the instance and then you can switch.
Can you though? You'll lose all your data, your posts, your liles, your comments, your curated list of communities and usually also your Username. People don't like giving up their entire existence just because they made a wrong choice in the beginning.
This is the position of migrating social medias in the first place though.
And they don't even say server but "instance". Like need special words to keep the unwashed out.
I don't get why more companies. Especially ones who might be concerned with control of their content like I dunno. lets say news agencies and the like. I don't get that they would not want to run their own instances and federate.
Especially when the Canucks account was hijacked by Elon Musk placing his crypto scam video as the top post on their page.
Considering Mastodon sucks from a UX perspective i don't blame them or users. Mastodon seems to be a great case of Open Source and decentralized being so fervently followed that people ignore the absolute real problems with it thus ensuring it will never become any type of mainstream.
Actually trying to find interesting content on Mastodon is fuckin awful, bluesky learned what i liked and hands me new awesome artists pretty much daily. Combine that with the whole having to select an instance and remember how to use it and cross instance posting and blah blah blah and your average person is not even going to look at Mastodon
Considering Mastodon sucks from a UX perspective i don't blame them or users.
This narrative is tired, particularly with Mastodon.
All open source projects that aren't violently ruthless about pursuing profits are going to lag behind tech companies approaching social media from the perspective of a cigarette company that also is selling the capacity to rich interests to distort, artificially elevate or silence perspectives.
Should we all push for a more accessible fediverse? Of course, but what is your perspective bringing to the table that does anything other than restate the incredible material inequality in resources between the two things you are comparing?
On the contrary I think the UX of mastodon is impressively boring and functional compared to the ever enshittifying slop and paper thin future promises served up by multimillion and multibillion dollar social media companies.
I agree that the UI is largely functional first (with no bugs since I started using it, which is hella cool), but it's a bit unfriendly to new users. For example, it breaks from convention when replying to a comment, and the themes need a better separation between posts, and it needs to expand on existing features. All it needs is a little TLC, but it's been almost the same for over a year. I've only noticed subtle changes on Lemmy UI and none on Mastodon that have any impact.
Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to overly defend the Mastodon project in particular, I use Mastodon, I have for years but yeah there are lots of issues with it.
....but the difference between Bluesky and the Fediverse is that RIGHT NOW, ALREADY you can use a different microblogging software written and maintained by different people with different ideologies and different objectives that will still interact and interconnect with Mastodon pretty well most of the time. Not only that, but Mastodon (and I assume other microblogging fediverse softwares) already have multiple different themes and the customization options are simply up to how many people are willing to get their hands dirty... and the sense of customization isn't a marketing bullet point it is a deeply held ideology that is expressed in the very architecture of the fediverse, Bluesky on the other hand can only gesture in the vague direction of these things without rocking the boat of venture capital investors too hard. They have not still as far as I am aware ruled out using ads, according to the CEO of Bluesky (which Mastodon doesn't have a CEO notably).
And that is fine if you feel that way, but it's not going to match the majority of people and it's going to prevent the platform from ever achieving any type of mainstream status.
I personally do not agree with you, I find the ux to actually hinder usability. I do use Mastodon, because otherwise forming an opinion on it would be stupid. I regularly still struggle to find content I'm interested in on Mastodon, searching all the different instances is a pain. Hashtags are not adequate most content is never even tagged, even the stuff that is tagged might not be tagged in a way I expect because everybody tags things differently. This makes searching for Content I'm interested in very difficult.
I have to actually invest a pretty sizable amount of my time on Mastodon just trying to find something on Mastodon I want to interact with. Compare that with something like blue sky I open the app and the algorithm has already figured out what I like just from me liking stuff as it appears that I'm pretty much instantly greeted with a wall of nothing but stuff that I'm interested in in some capacity.
It's coming from a corporation that just wants to make money but the end result is that they gave me something that I was actually interested in immediately without me having to jump through a bunch of Hoops and that's just objectively a better user experience
I have no issues finding content on mastodon, just search and follow hashtags.
And most people prefer content algorithms. Or maybe a better way of phrasing it would be they're used to and expect content algorithms. Having to actively search for and follow topics is not only yet another hoop users have to jump through (good UX has as few steps as possible to get you where you want, a good chunk of users jumps ship at every step) it also requires that they know which hashtags are being used for the content they want to see beforehand, which might be difficult for you if you relied on content algorithms before.
Weird how a marginal effort immediately puts people off.
WALL-E and Idiocracy vibes...
Not only that have you seen user-generated content? There is absolutely no consistent tagging whatsoever. That is like the worst way to find things because everyone will tag things differently assuming they even tag it at all
Mastodonโs stance on the matter has been strongly opposed to algorithmic feeds
But thanks to ActivityPub (the protocol behind Mastodon and Lemmy) thereโs also Minds (warning contains cryptocurrencies) https://help.minds.com/hc/minds/articles/1694176102-feeds
Shoutout to the European Commission: https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/@EUCommission
Most are still on X here :(
Japan still stubbornly holds on as well. Insta eventually started to take over some things from Twitter, but tons of stuff is still there. I created a BlueSky for the small business I'm starting here in Japan and my wife asked me what that was and why no twitter.
X lost 11 million users in the EU
Not really happening in the Czech Republic
Junkie Elmo is the correct character to use here. Why do we crave enshitification so badly?
Because Money ๐ค And Profits ๐ And a new Yacht! ๐
What's that, you can't afford groceries? Fuck off, poor.
It makes sense that they would go where the users are.
But not having a separate, European instance federated into the BlueSky network, that's the real wtf.
What if I told you Bluesky federates just as well as WhatsApp does with XMPP.
Surely that's a bit unfair to BlueSky.
From my brief lecture of the underlying protocol, public instances could exist and federate, it's only that they become quite expensive to run if done right.
Federation with bluesky is just that technically theoretical. Creating a protocol that allows for federation is not enough
Stimulating others to federate by making it virtually impossible without only billions in the bank for zero profit sounds great ๐คก.
It smells of ~~green~~ federate washing. A way to point legislators/ populous that bluesky is different, really, I swear, trust me bro ๐คก .
Instead of writing white papers Lemmy/Mbin/GoToSocial/jackal started with writing detailed documentation in how to run your own. In the scope of reality (not theory) ๐คก