Greetings, I recently subscribed to this list but haven't seen any action yet, so I guess I'll give it a go and see what happens next.
By education I'm a political scientist. By profession I'm a "Product Owner" for a large automobile manufacture. Most of my professional career has circled around and near in-vehicle Infotainment over the last 10+ years. I have tried to use "federated social media" for a number of years. I had had an identi.ca account, and later I signed up for a pump.io instance. But never really "got it" nor used it much before the servers kind of died. This year I had decided I was going to finally make the plunge and make GNU Social my primary online social media. After reviewing https://gnusocial.network/try/ I joined the instance at 2mb.social based solely on "well I'm in the U.S. so I suspect it’s the fastest for me." When I first joined, I really liked it, particularly I liked how the groups looked like it was to work. I thought it was the joys of Facebook Groups in the convenience of Twitter, without all the freedom limitations. But I found it really hard to find anyone to follow or interact with on the instance. Most accounts I say on the timeline appeared to just be bots. I decided to give up Facebook for lent this year, so during mardis gras I made a big deal to all my "friends" about joining me on GNU Social, added it to all my emails signatures and the like and dove in. A few days after Ash Wednesday I found myself trying to log back on to Facebook, but to prevent myself from doing so I ended up learning about the "rest" of the fediverse and found there was so much more than I was seeing on my GNU Social instance. I had heard of Mastadon before, but didn't realize it would talk to GNU Social, and I ended up joining a Friendica instance. I was amazed how quickly the fediverse went from something no one was at to something everyone was at. I had also put in a few requests to join a number of mastodon instances, and now I'm on two of those too, though the one I had been most interested in run by my local Science-Fiction and "Open-Source Software" Convention is still just sitting in a mod que somewhere. But after a time I thought I don’t' want to just give up on GNU Social. Too many Free Software and other "open source" projects get abandoned particularly when not part of a bigger solution. And I'm fearful without GNU Social the fediverse won't actually matter in the long term. I started to realize that a lot of the problems I was having may not have been with GNU Social, but with the particular instance I was using. I have tried many different avenues to contact "Mike and Billy" who allegedly run 2mb.social but I haven't been successful. I would hope there would be a way to find what's going on with their server vs. what’s going on with the project. Things like remote follows nearly always failing, replies not being seen by the original poster, inability to add new users to groups etc. I really want to get more involved and not just be a user. But I don't know the best way to go about it. I've always been a Freedom guy, and that's why i got my BS in Political Science, because I thought getting involved with politics would help me form the world I wanted, to see liberty in our lifetime. Through the efforts of the FSF, which I was first introduced to after using OpenOffice.org off a Knoppix GNU/Linux live CD, I realized how much more there was in the fight for freedom in this world. I fell in love with the IDEA of free software. I got my employer to pay for me to go to Community College to take software engineering courses, and I learned I liked the IDEA of coding a lot more than I liked coding. I haven't written a line of code since I finished those courses, but I did get a lot better understanding of the whole world of these things, which lead me to get a much better paying job in the private sector, which in turn gave me more free time to help out in my local community than I ever was when I was being paid to be a "community organizer" Anyway, enough about me, what can I do to help make GNU Social, including 2mb.social, better? https://2mb.social/fu https://theres.life/@fuat2mb https://libranet.de/fu https://hostux.social/@Fu Yours in liberation, Jim Fulner Promoting Freed Minds, Freed Markets and Free Software and whenever possible Free Beer "For as long as one of your brothers is not free, none of you are free" 586-473-7007 Follow me on the world's best decentralized social media platform GNU Social. https://2mb.social/fu Aren't you tired of big government backed corporations managing your social interactions?
