When you're trying to decentralise your technology, one of the key things to consider is your computer's Operating System (OS).
Your OS is the most important piece of software in your computer, that makes it possible for your programs to use your hardware.

Usually when people buy a computer, an OS comes pre-installed. For most computers this is Microsoft Windows, although Apple computers have their own OS called MacOS.
However, it is possible to replace the pre-installed OS by choosing a different OS yourself and installing it. Linux OSs are the most popular alternative.

Why switch OS?

Windows especially pushes very strongly to centralisation. Forcing users to create an online account, controlling when their computer updates and what is installed, and sending data about the computer's usage back to Microsoft all being prime examples. This leads to a feeling that your computer belongs to Microsoft instead of you.

People who want to take back control often choose to install a different OS.

What are distros?

When you first look into installing Linux, you'll see a lot of people telling you to choose a "distro", short for "distribution". This is because Linux, technically speaking, is only one part of the OS. Packaging it together with other software is what turns it into a full OS. And there are different sets of software you can choose, each called a "distribution".

Choosing a distro is not as big a deal as it sounds and should not discourage you. The main things to consider are: do you want frequent small updates to keep your OS on the cutting-edge (rolling-release model) or infrequent large updates to keep your OS stable (fixed release model).

Note that the "look and feel" of a Linux OS comes from its "desktop environment" (DE), not directly from the distribution - if you find a DE you like the look of, there are usually many different distros that can use that DE.

Some examples of Linux OSs

• Linux Mint: Fixed release, DE choice of Cinnamon, MATE or XFCE
• CachyOS: Rolling release, many different DEs offered during installation (KDE is default)

Addendum: Free Software

As requested in the comments, I'm adding a little text to mention that Linux is Free/Open Source Software. You don't need to understand this to use Linux, but you may be interested in the topic. The free part refers to freedom, rather than "free of charge" (although most Linux distros are also free of charge). What this means in practical terms is that the source code of a program can be read by anyone to verify that nothing nasty is included, and also forked to create a new program if the direction of the original diverges too far from what people want. These traits are particularly useful for an operating system, since it has complete access to your computer and its files.

A simple one to start off. A program that was created so people can read Wikipedia if their Internet connection is down, or if access was blocked for some reason. Later extended to support other content, like old books that are out of copyright, docs for programming languages and the ArchWiki.

It gets the job done, even if the interface isn't the clearest. As far as I can tell it doesn't support any auto-updating, so it seems you do have to download a whole new version of each site when you want new stuff.

Have you used Kiwix? What do you think?

What do we mean by Home Computing?

Home computing is one of the greatest inventions of the late 20th century. Emerging from a time when only large organisations had computing power, ordinary people gained the ability to run computers independently in their own homes, without needing to connect to a machine owned by somebody else.

In the last couple of decades, however, Big Tech has been trying to reverse this, forcing people back to a centralised model with cloud computing, apps that only work when connected to the Internet, and people's personal files held in an online account that can be deactivated at any time by the platform hosting it.

But this isn't a community for complaining about them. This is a community for discussing ways to bring computing back into our homes.

This community isn't against using the Internet entirely, of course. Some uses of the Internet cannot be performed offline, such as sending messages to other people, or running software updates. These are perfectly reasonable. What's not reasonable is being expected to connect to someone else's server and log into an account for every little computing task.

Good posts

• Asking for recommendations for home computing hardware/software
• Giving recommendations for home computing hardware/software
• Asking for help setting up home computing hardware/software

Bad posts

• Articles and/or rants about the latest example of centralisation committed by big tech (we know big tech sucks, that's why we are here)

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For people sick of everything requiring Internet connections, online accounts and subscriptions

When trying to convince people to move to Fediverse services, people will often refer to them as "alternatives", calling Mastodon a Twitter-alternative, PeerTube a YouTube-alternative, etc. But I don't think this is the most effective approach.

This is a problem I noticed before I even heard of the Fediverse, because FOSS advocates do the same thing.

The issue is that to the average person, THING-alternative just means that if you already have THING, you don't need it. Or even worse, people will assume it's an inferior imitator. Most people aren't looking for "alternatives". When they adopt new social media it's in response to trends.

Look at mainstream social media for example. When TikTok appeared as a new video platform, it didn't call itself a "YouTube alternative".

So, at a minimum, I would advise not referring to services as "alternatives" but simply "cool new services/apps" and exalting their best features from a user perspective.

I have other thoughts on how to advertise the Fediverse, but I don't want to make this post too long.

Are there any websites or communities dedicated to finding offline alternatives to software that is unnecessarily-Internet based?

I can think of two use cases:

• Software-as-a-service for something that could easily be a downloadable program to run locally
• "Smart" devices that require you to connect to the Internet, and serve you ads

There are websites for finding FOSS alternatives to proprietary apps, EU alternatives to American services, etc. but I don't see a website for local-app alternatives to online services.

What I'm imagining is that someone running a project (like a game studio for example) creates an instance of PieFed or Lemmy or whatever, disables sign-ups, creates community(-ies) for their project(s), and lets people post there.

It would not only allow people to interact without having to create new accounts, but could also help spread awareness of their project.

So I wonder (a) is this possible (b) are the any downsides I'm not aware of.

While I don't currently play online multiplayer games, I have been following the "Stop Killing Games" campaign, and of course noticed that the main reason that publishers can render games unplayable is centralization.

Games didn't always use centralized servers - they used to be run by players, but simply reverting to that model wouldn't provide the functionality players expect. They want to be able to play with people they don't already know - anyone who's online at the same time.

So it seems like a good use case for federation, do you agree? Each instance could be a "playerbase" and allow games to find players and servers to bring together.

I was thinking about account portability. While I haven't had to migrate instances myself, it does seem like it would be highly inconvenient. How do you let people know it's the same account?

The traditional way is to leave a notice on the old account, but what if that's not possible (e.g. the old instance shut down suddenly). It would be better to have a way to automatically let people (and instances) know that the new account is the same user as the old one - so that subscribers stay subscribed, and there is no confusion.

With optional cryptographic signing for account identity, this issue could be ameliorated. The user could keep the private key, and share the public key with Fediverse instances.

What do you think?

Please note: I'm not talking about replacing any existing functionality, only adding to it.

I was looking at Voyager on my phone and saw communities I hadn't subscribed to in my home feed, and upvotes on posts I hadn't voted on (or even seen before). When I tried to remove the upvotes, a message said "problem voting, please try again".

Thankfully, when I view PieFed through Firefox, these problems don't exist, so it must be the app. Not overly surprising since it was initially developed for Lemmy, I believe.

Not sure what changed to cause this problem or whether the change was in Voyager or PieFed.

I'm sure there are some good reasons, but I don't know what those reasons are.

I've noticed that sometimes the instance of the community doesn't match the instance of the user who posted there, and I was wondering why they chose to post to that community instead of an equivalent one on the instance they joined. Are there pros and cons to doing this?