I do a presentation of the Fediverse to my college students and will soon be giving short workshops to organization as well. I realize that a viable, decentralized altenative to Facebook is IMO the biggest missing piece of the puzzle. We need something that offers some kind of central platform for networking, events, groups, etc. For work related stuff I present Nexcloud. Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed and Loops are getting really interesting and working alternative to their counterparts. I believe if we could get a massive movement of people to adopt an FOSS alternative to Facebook, everything else would easily follow. What do you people think, what would you recommend? I haven't tried Friendica yet.

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[–] ExtremeDullard@piefed.social 9 points 4 days ago (15 children)

Facebook is like Myspace: it's has-been. If I was a developers interested in contributing to the Fediverse, that's the last social media I'd choose to spend my time reimplementing.

[–] Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works 15 points 4 days ago (12 children)

No matter what your opinion on fb is, each time I do my presentation, it's the main thing people ask me for. To my suprise, even my students in their young 20s are using it a lot, and it's the main platform for people over 40. Billion of people uses it everyday so I wouldn't call it has-been. If we could bring even a small percentage of these people to the fedi, it would destabilise the economic model social media is based on. I'm not saying I like fb, I actually never have, but we can't pretend people are over with it.

[–] XiELEd@piefed.social 7 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (10 children)

I'm pretty much forced to use Facebook and Messenger because of school. Some teachers will grade you only if you upload your work and tag them on Facebook, sometimes you have to repost or like videos because your project is a video and there's a group competition based on those metrics. Messenger is the default mode of communication between students and teachers, as well as a way to contact people for your graded surveys.

[–] DougHolland@lemmy.world 14 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I've avoided Facebook for so long, the idea that it's required as part of an 'education system' bewilders me. Wow.

[–] Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)

You have no idea how deep the education system is now into gafam. To study in Quebec now, you absolutly need a cell phone with ms authenticator, teams is basically mandatory, etc. I'm one of the only teacher at my college that cares enough to show use and show foss alternative to my students. For example Moodle is the most powerfull tool a teacher could dream of for grades, quizz, file sharing, assigments, etc. Yet most teachers prefer ms bullshit suite for everything...

[–] Archer@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

Awesome that Moodle is still around!

[–] Dreaming_Novaling@lemmy.zip 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

GroupMe (Microsoft) and Discord isn't required for pure learning purposes, but 99% of clubs at my school use them, so I'd be unable to participate in a lot of shit if I dropped them.

Instead we just get stalked by Canvas for any assignment/classwork related purposes. Oh, and lockdown browser for online tests...

But I could totally believe teachers forcing students to use some shitty app to communicate with students and submit work.

Edit: Not necessarily social media, but AWS exploded today and so Canvas (school learning platform) is down and my classes literally can't do online assignments until it's fixed lol. So yeah dependency on big tech can suck sometimes.

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