On Monday, 20 April 2026 09:54:54 AEST Jason J.G. White via luv-main wrote: > Russell Coker via luv-main <[email protected]> wrote: > >Firstly a disclaimer, I dislike Facebook for many reasons and would prefer > >it if the company went bankrupt and shut down. But as that's not going to > >happen and there's an estimated 17.7 million Facebook users in Australia > >(almost 2/3 of the population) we have to deal with that. > > Thank you - I didn't appreciate that Facebook was still so prevalent. I > don't have an account there, and I don't plan to obtain one at this > point, unless there's a good professional reason.
I'm not suggesting that anyone create a Facebook account for the sole purpose of promoting FOSS. But of the 17 million Facebook users in Australia I'm sure that more than few of them are FOSS users. People who have children tend to have Facebook accounts because there are many childcare resources on there and also many groups use it to arrange events. There aren't many people who have such a strong objection to non-free platforms that they would deny their children opportunities for play dates arranged on Facebook. Community groups tend to randomly select platforms for communication. For example Rotary has no official platform recommendations for it's group so every group can make their own choice about how to communicate, all it takes is one outspoken member to say "Facebook Messenger is great" and you get the entire group using it. There are many people who are forced to use Facebook because it's used to promote various organisations. So if someone with a bit of computer skill volunteers for an organisation like Rotary someone will say "oh it's great you know computers you can promote our club on Facebook". One major difference between proprietary social networking and FOSS alternatives is that the proprietary systems are specifically and carefully designed to be as addictive as possible. If you create a Facebook account for one specific purpose then it will promote a feed of articles related to that, you will read them, find some interesting, and it will send more targetted articles to you. It would be good to have people who read articles about Linux as part of random tech news suddenly have in their Facebook feed posts about FOSS meetings and events. > Threads federates with ActivityPub, so you may be able to post to that > from a Mastodon, Pleroma or GoToSocial instance without having an > account. As I understand it, though, Threads is entirely separate from > Facebook, though owned by the same company. If the aim is to be as FOSS as possible while still communicating with relatives who use proprietary platforms that may work. If the aim is to establish communication with people who don't know you and are new to FOSS you want the best quality and don't want anything to get messed up in transmission so you want to use the platform natively. That said I don't think Threads is that popular and it doesn't have the social coercion that Facebook has. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/ _______________________________________________ luv-main mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
