I’m quite happy with Voyager, never used anything else.

In Australia you do a visit and stay in the centre to check it out with your child. Next visit is short, and you leave your child for maybe 1 hour. If all good next time usually a half day or two, and then full days. My daughter has been 1 day a week since 3 months old (though is also in sessional Kinder now 3 days a week x 5 hours). Here there is reasonably well funded early learning, but the sector does have some major issues. I’ve been very happy with my centre and my daughter is happy enough there, though she prefers sessional Kinder.

It really is bad, I agree completely! The few good things are usually available elsewhere anyway.

I knew this and let my child have YT kids for a while with only content I allowed, but even with that… I noticed a real difference in her behaviour when she had more use of it than ABC Kids. There’s something about the way it is designed that is problematic to young brains. Maybe it’s the same for adults using regular YT though!!​

I got rid of YT kids after she had a rare meltdown, and I think she is much happier overall. If I want any content from YT for her that I think is ok, I use YTDLnis and store a local copy - that’s better anyway as it’s there even if the internet isn’t available.

It’s hard. I am enmeshed in modernity fairly thoroughly but I am trying to do better. I have an EV heat pump and all electric house, I try to find others that are also aware of how bad things are likely to get in future, I am doing National Tree Day every year and also growing veges and fruits and herbs at home, and I am trying to limit exposure to and use of plastics (but that is so damn hard unless plastics become illegal…)

Being aware and using that awareness to try and change behaviour is a big focus. But also, don’t be too hard on yourself. We were born into this mess too, we didn’t create it in one generation, and it is likely to be a slower decline from a human perspective rather than instantaneous, though on geological scale it’s basically a blink of an eye. I was super scared of global warming and nuclear war as a kid, and while risks of both have increased I’m still alive and even with a choice to reduce use of certain things, I think I still have a great life, and my daughter has so far too.

What if your hairstylist is on the Fediverse, avoids mainstream social media, and spends a lot of their spare time reading scientific papers?

Thanks for this comment! It really explains exactly why Friendica is struggling.

Is a real shame as IMO events (and groups) are really important to get a critical mass of adoption in Fedi. I look at sites like Allevents.in which allow people to submit but most of their event data is scraped from FB. We need Fedi instances which make searching events easy. So many groups and individuals and organisations feel unable to leave FB because they can’t see anywhere else to tell people about events, at the moment that is pretty true. But it needs to be an allrounder site, not an event specialist site.

But not being able to connect to busy Lemmy communities would mean Friendica isn’t an ideal allrounder, and even if the Friendica instance got big and has very busy groups, it would have issues.

I hope that these issues get solved!

Oh, it’s dangerous and harmful all right : to their business model.

I think the big G is probably starting to get pretty nervous about self hosting. It absolutely is a threat to their existence. They are nothing without users.

There’s a lot of us fed up with enshittification and every video that helps people break free of their capture is extremely dangerous to them. Seriously.

I’m hoping to start a Friendica instance, it’s been around for a long time and actually has events, which is something NO other social network has managed to add and one of the main reasons people I know who don’t like Facebook will feel compelled to use it, there’s no other easy way to create and invite people to events.

I also tried to get people to try G+, before that Diaspora, and neither got many people interested: but I think Fedi has now proved its not going away. There needs to be sustained local push to relocalise communities, this is happening in a few places, and enough nontechy people are starting to really understand the danger of FB and the silo mentality.

I do concede that there has been a trend towards xenophobia that has been exacerbated by filter bubbles and even more by algorithms. But the balance is that people who once had no choice but to suffer ostracism and extreme isolation have been able find community online and have improved mental health and outcomes in many ways.

I certainly found this myself in the early days of the internet before the iron fist of corporatism grabbed this fledgling space, determined to extract value from it, and creating the nightmares of isolation and hate that are now Farcebork and its ilk. Fedi has been a welcome return to smaller communities that have to do the necessary work of self management, which reduces the hate and isolation that is promoted by antisocial media, even if it doesn’t stop it altogether.

My point is, the internet isn’t worse. Humans can be good or bad, but certain environments make them behave in worse ways, and these environments can exist both online and off.

Honestly? I live in a small town, and face to face isn’t much better. People are incredibly bigoted, and might be polite to your face but incredibly judgemental and small minded, especially to anyone perceived as different. Empathy is a skill that needs to be practised, like meditation. And many people lack it both online and off.

I’ve seen people say that Farcebork was like being in a small town, actively making that kind of everyone-knowing-everyone’s-business a reality again for communities fractured by urban anonymity.

But that was there in spades in the early internet, it’s just that normies hadn’t been beaten over the head by social conditioning by the corporate overlords yet to join in.

It’s human nature to think and behave tribally. So we should expect it to continue in the Fediverse, we just can’t shove the problem over to someone else to manage and take their tithe in eyeballs, and thus fracture our communities all over again: we have to do it ourselves. Drama fucking sucks, wherever is found, but we have to accept it’s our job to manage if we don’t want to trade our freedom for a padded cell.

Sure, I agree, but I think it’s reasonable to think about limiting procreation ideally to one child per couple ethically who wants the experience of parenting - obviously if you’ve already had more, there’s no backsies, but the pathway of many countries now is even below that number anyway. It’s absolutely sick the Christofascist obsession with forcing women to give birth especially as they really don’t care what happens to the babies once they are born. But if you want to parent, it really is a wonderful thing. If you WANT it, not forced, and not selfishly breeding beyond the capacity of the planet, which no individual is doing if they only replace one for two leaving, that’s the right direction (but it doesn’t work for colonialism, oh noes)

Managed population descent is possible though, even if unlikely, and we can hope that the overall population growth curve is maxed out very soon by choice not by circumstance/disaster.

He was right, and yes, we will indeed see a colossal crash within the next few decades unless some truly magical technology somehow happens, and that would just kick the can down the road a bit further anyway, unless we can rein in the culture of colonialism and endless growth.

Two books that are vital reading in this time:

The Limits to Growth by The Club of Rome

and

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.

Parenting is one of the most natural and essential human experiences. Don’t regret it, even if you expect things to be harder for your child or children. Don’t sugar coat things for your kids either, we have hard times ahead. No one can be certain even of next week, and life wants to create life. Each moment is worth it.

OMG how did I miss seeing this before now

Interesting article, and it did change my view slightly of what ATProto is, but not by a huge amount.

Given the current political climate, a few days ago I randomly started wondering… what if some governments around the world acknowledged that communicating through Farcebok or Xitter is no longer tenable, and committed to providing social media infrastructure hosted in their own countries as a public good: “your tax dollars at work!”

Would ATProto make sense in these cases? They have the resources, and ATProto might seem more attractive/robust for that kind of scale compared to ActivityPub?

Awww this reminds me of the early days of Flickr.

Yup. At least a decade ago I used to explain how important interoperability was to legislate for, and used this as the main example of why. Networks are better for everyone when there is no lock in, and the waste of competition for eyeballs could be avoided. It’s sad that most people truly don’t understand this.

There’s a new server planned relatively locally to me and it’s capitalising on the terrifying plunge into fascism that all the Big Socials now have as their badge of dishonour. People have never been “happy” to be on Facebook but the local focus in a pretty leftie inner city area is a good idea. If people know people irl on Fedi they will maybe have an easier time.

I love Tusky, it is my app of choice for Mastodon