#Request for fediverse #recommendations -
I go to regional burns (#BurningMan - type events) in my USA region and the principal way of organizing and connecting people is #facebook. I do not love this. I have suggested my local burner groups create a parallel group or two here on #mastodon. I'm looking for
(a) Recommendations for a server to point people to (probably #mastodon but that's because Mastodon is all I know; I'm open to other ideas), and
(b) Pointers to how groups get done now that gup.pe is offline.
Notes:
- Local (above) means within a 2- to 5-state radius in the USA. Many people are hundreds of km (and miles) apart. Most people have no real chance of in-person meeting between burns.
- If it is possible to have both public and private forums (like on FB), that would be great; burners discuss things that happened at burns and, for a variety of reasons, many don't want those discussions visible to the wider universe (this need might be partly met with anonymous usernames, without truly private groups).
- Server recommendations: people with no #fediverse experience will be much more likely to make fediverse accounts and use them if I point them to a non-toxic, probably-functional-for-a-while server that would be a good fit, rather than just saying "Go find a server."
- Burners are pretty good fedizens already: they tend to be silly, friendly, and strongly social justice-oriented. Many are anarchists and burns are frequently described as temporary anarchist communities. Of course I immediately thought of beige.party, but I don't know a ton of servers. I have had good experiences with c.im, as well. I've heard some reasons not to send people to mastodon.social. Aaaaand I'm out of ideas.
- I'm not interested in running my own server. Years fighting with self-hosted services like nextcloud, limesurvey, and moodle have shown me I do not have the skills or time to maintain something like this. It's possible that, if enough burners come to the fediverse, someone with more skills and time might set up a server, but that is not on the horizon right now.
- The social aspect of social media is important here. I don't want to recommend lemmy; I think something that facilitates immediate interaction more smoothly would be better. If there's a recommendation to use services besides Mastodon, I think something with a lot of active users would be best, to make the newcomers understand at a gut level that they are in an active larger community. For that reason, I'm not as interested right now in a newer service that has few people and doesn't federate seamlessly with other services.
- I'm trying to avoid bluesky (for probably-obvious reasons). That's where I'm pretty sure some people will start recommending if the fediverse transition is too complicated or not "social-feeling" enough. All recommendations to leave corporate social media seem to gravitate toward bluesky recommendations, so I suspect those are going to happen, and I'd like for people to not feel a need to go anywhere but the fediverse.
Right now, probably because of my limited experience, I'm thinking #mastodon instead of #friendica (which seems less trafficked than mastodon... but IDK) or other fediverse platforms. I'm very open to other suggestions, recognizing my limited perspective.
Send me your suggestions for any of the following, if you have them:
- Mastodon servers to recommend for people who don't want or know how to search for one that fits them
- Different platforms besides Mastodon (if you think others would be better for this)
- Explainers for how groups work now (realizing I didn't really understand how they worked before gup.pe went down)
- Changing this entire plan if it seems misguided
