NebLem

It should be illegal to not allow unlocking the bootloader, but it is very common.

Looking at its Wikipedia entry, it looks like a reasonable alternative, I hadn’t looked into it before.

Have you had the chance to try it out?

Not reviewed in this eval:

• DeltaChat (though would likely score similar to Signal with more points for decentralization)
• IRC
• XMPP
• Lemmy/PieFed/Nodebb (if he’s going to include Discourse…)

Looks like its available as opt-in, but as part of their premium / ee not FOSS build. Bummer.

So Rocket.Chat (which TIL can federate to Matrix)?

Looks like its showing in the DDG results for me this evening.

https://fedi-search.com/ which just adds the site parameters for different popular instances for the major search engines is probably the closest we have.

Marginalia.nu at least indexes the small web, but to my knowledge doesn’t really index the fedi yet.

The web instances work pretty well, that’s a shame the iOS app didn’t work for you. I’m only a consumer not a producer of video content so I interact with a fedi microblogging platform instead of having an account on a peertube platform itself. The Android app seemed okay but following users with RSS and interacting via my microblogging account, as well as directly checking my favorite platforms’ sites occasionally for serendipity seems to work the best for me.

I’m sure with the fundraising blitz the apps will get better too this year.

https://theindiebeat.fm/ - in many ways a successor to RadioFreeFedi that plays a variety of channels of Fedi indie artists. Plays opted in artists hosted on Bandwagon.

http://stream.live.vc.bbcmedia.co.uk/bbc_world_service - sometimes listen when I want a news fix

http://live.lora924.de:8000/lora-hq.mp3 - public radio in München, trying to learn more German and its a decent mix of talk and music.

Meanwhile https://joinloops.org/ and https://joinpeertube.org/ keep getting better and better

Hopefully more creators will take notice and at least crosspost their content on better platforms too.

Outside getting people to join a fedi platform, Matrix instance, or Signal, all a non-trivial ask, you could see if they’re on Discord or WhatsApp already, which while neither is great at least its a step away. You could do a simple SMS group, if you are okay with the privacy risks - almost everyone still had a phone number.

Post mail surprisingly is still a thing too if you are okay with delayed messages and there being cost.

You can get the RSS feed and check it in a feed reader, for example for Sh.itjust.works you can use the feed https://sh.itjust.works/feeds/local.xml?sort=Active .

I’m not aware of any Lemmy app having such a feature though.

I predict it’ll go Meta and have fake accounts to keep engagement up plus a “AI matchmaker” assistant that will tell you its “advice” on the situation, mostly to get you to add more personal information.

The company is probably already using user data to build gay-interest advertising models for capitalism and gay-dar models for tyrants, but this policy will let them more openly sell that data.

Only thing not really mentioned in the other comments are Pixelfed and PeerTube. Again you gotta make genuine stuff not ads but if you put at least some effort in the videos and post semi regularly (and ideally use your own instance) you’ll be top in whatever niche you choose to highlight your business with. I can’t say the garden tending would make great business sense (it won’t bring you many new customers) but if the work you do is your passion, its another outlet to share it. Its also not bad to have your own (labeled) ad channel (on your instance), archives can bring nostalgia / meme material, but local only, and don’t boost them.

I don’t think it’d be bad to have your own threadiverse and microblogging platform instances for support and slice of life type stories, but that’s for interacting with existing customers and fans, not for gaining new ones. I’d caution interacting outside of your instance in that space unless pinged / mentioned directly, even more carefully than you would in other socials.

You all exit your editor? How you do the rest of your computing?

/s with ♡ from an Emacs fan.

Yeah I’m probably in the same boat, got love being an old.

You can always just subscribe to your favorite creators via RSS instead of relying on their subscription tools. It does kill some discovery potential but its not like you still don’t get recommendations when going to the video.

Almost all alternatives will be based on Open Street Map (OSM), and your mileage will very on the amount of detail from your local contributors. The two I primarily use are:

CoMaps (community fork of Organic Maps) has a clean intuitive interface and a decent router algorithm. Lots of developer energy and good community governance. Offline first, allows some OSM editing, quick to load and routing. Downsides are its limited feature set and configuration.

OsmAnd is a bit older but includes more routing options, near full OSM point of interests (POIs, locations like stores, buildings, etc) editing options, shows more POI types (configurable but can get noisy), has optional Mapillary (community Streetview style project unfortunately ran by Meta) integration, optional weather data, over and under layers from other sources, and optionally incorporates Wikipedia and Wikivoyage data filling in some gaps. Its interface is a bit more clunky, and somewhat slower, but it does a lot. Get the OSMAnd~ version from Fdroid, which has most of the “pro” (paid) version but without Google services. The actual paid version does have Google reviews and more POI search engine, but you’re using Google again.

Both are offline first but also both suffer from no review system integrations or traffic integrations (no Waze/GMaps reporting of slow downs or speed traps).

https://marginalia-search.com/ is pretty great for a different approach to search. While not exactly what you were asking for since its free, you can definitely pay via donations if you find it valuable.

And if you don’t want Signal because its “too centralized” for whatever reason, there’s DeltaChat, SimpleX, and good ol’ XMPP.