I didnt really use social media much before trying out fediverse alternatives.
Mainly just reddit, with occasional Instagram. When considering the switch, Instagram was easy to consider letting go of, Reddit not so much.
But then around the same time I got into photography, and wanted insta as a way to present my portfolio. So then I put off fediverse again, because life was also really chaotic.
After a while, life got less chaotic, and I looked into everything again.
I didn’t end up using insta for photos, and to my friends’ dismay, I hadn’t gotten any better at using it to see their lives either. I don’t find the app addictive, although I can see why it is. I found it annoying. I think the chaos of my life(grad school) meant I never really got sucked into the whole short form content like everyone else.
Reddit was still tough to consider letting go of. But ultimately I found Lemmy and Pixelfed and thought “wth why not”
Fucking hell I love the fediverse. It may be smaller, but it’s growing. But even if it stopped growing, all the platforms feel “lived in” to use words that could describe an open world rpg.
And it’s fun, and it feels safe in a way. There’s a relief knowing that I don’t have some company I have to worry about that curates the world it wants me to see, rather than the world I want to see. I’m finding myself doom scrolling a bit less and focusing more on my hobbyist circles. But uncensored world news is available when I feel like keeping myself up to date with the happenings of the world rn.
It’s amazing, a breath of fresh air and gives me hope in a world where hope is feeling less and less common.
I also have a lot of sway with friends and family, they trust my opinions on things. And so I’m excited to get some converts too. I like sharing my life with friends and family and seeing there’s. I look forward to doing so on free platforms.
I plan on donating money to fediverse contributors as well, because they are doing amazing work.
Okay, done rambling now. I just feel lighter a little, like I can enjoy being on the internet again, even if it’s just one small corner of that internet.
It will be difficult, but technically possible. You’d have to ensure bitlocker is disabled on your windows drive. If you’re not sure what that is, don’t assume that means it’s not enabled. Windows does enable it by default in some cases. It encrypts your drive and you won’t be able to access it.
But in all honesty, I’d recommend just starting from scratch if steam games are what you’re most worried about. First, some of them might not work on Linux. Second, you may encounter strange issues that require redownloading much of your library anyway. Lastly, you’ll want to transfer them to a drive with a Linux file system which will take time. That’s if you even have the drive space to spare. More likely is you’ll be formatting that drive anyway to a Linux filesystem, wiping the contents anyway.
Even with slow internet, redownloading games as needed will be way easier and likely faster.
If you’re unsure what distro to go with, I recommend going with Bazzite. It’s a distro optimized for gaming and is an atomic distro. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry about it, just know that for most casual users, an atomic distro makes way more sense and is much less likely to break. Additionally, if you have nvidia hardware, the drivers come pre installed so it’ll work right out of the box.