intro/Best-way to help

[Robert James Fulner]

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?