Noticed in one of your comments this is happening on Signal desktop. Is this a windows machine? Maybe update your post so people are aware it’s no on Android
Any suggestions on starting this process? I have a Raspberry Pi and was looking into self-hosted Google Drive/Photos/Gmail replacement. Best FOSS replacements?
Look up Syncthing and then never stop trying to replace closed source and paid software/services. Like any time you launch something ask yourself “does this hit the same way as when I swapped to Syncthing?” If the answer is no you then put “[name of thing you want to replace] foss alternative” into your search engine of choice. You’ll end up down so many rabbit holes, but you’ll come out the other side a whole lot better at making your technology work for you, not the company that made it, and with a suite of free open sourced tools you are in complete control of.
Here are some tools I use that are super easy to get going.
Syncthing (cloud storage replacement)
KeepassXC or Pass if you’re a command line person (locally stored password manager, coupled with Syncthing you have your own private cloud password manager
Tailscale/wireguard (private VPN that allows you to easily connect all your devices without exposing any of the traffic to The Internet)
PiHole (a DNS sinkhole that blocks a lot of ads and tracking on your entire network, bonus points if you set it as you Tailscale DNS provider to give all your devices ad block no matter where you are as long as the device was a connected to Tailscale)
Those are the ones that got me going and I personally believe act as a solid core. Most people will find all of those useful. Other services are more user specific, but that’s a lightweight bundle of software that your RPi will handle well. Much more and you might want to look at beefier hardware.
I have some small amount of experience with this, but based on the little I know, here’s what I can say. First question is what is your goal? To get customers, or to create a community? Below is general advice but it’s hard to say just talking about it in the abstract.
If you want a community, I would probably advise to just treat it as one more channel, have separate pages in Meta / X / Fediverse / Pinterest or whatever as separate communities, since in a lot of cases there won’t be overlap between them. I wouldn’t recommend abandoning your existing Meta or X pages to set up a Fediverse page instead, although making a contingency plan for the slow motion demise of Meta as a platform for the long term seems like a good idea.
If you want to drive sales, then for me Google Ads always worked better than buying advertising on Meta or X or etc anyway. Have you measured conversion numbers from Meta? They make it easy to spend money definitely, but I always found the ROI in terms of pure paid sales to be pretty bad from them.
Thank you for your reply. My goal is actually a combination, as our association organizes gaming conventions and we need customers, but at the same time, the main focus before the event is to have a community.
Hm, yeah, I would just start up a Mastodon page in parallel with the Meta page. Pick the right “home” server to join; that’s critically important for Mastodon in a way that it’s not for Meta. Put in charge of the page someone who’s genuinely excited about participating in Mastodon, and would be engaged with the gaming community there whether or not they were in charge of the page. I don’t think I would recommend spending anything on ad promotion of the Mastodon page, but like I say I’m not convinced of the utility of spending money on Meta promotion either. YMMV
Anyway like I say my level of knowledge about it is pretty minimal but I’m happy to talk more in depth on details of my experience also if you like.
Unless you can get the majority of your customer base on decentralized social media platforms, you’ll have to live with having to maintain a presence on both sides. Now if you’re asking how to run your business more securely on centralized platforms, general advice would be:
Use a separate account to manage your business page. Don’t use your personal account or email.
Logon to your business account on a desktop browser with uBO in a container tab. Know that you will be limited on some features (i.e. no reels/shorts on desktop).
You can only do so much to secure your account. Everything else is in the hands of the developers. I’m not really understanding.
Can you specifically say what your end goal is and what you want to avoid?
You mention privacy concerns, then population problems, but then ask about security - just looking for something more concrete ig would help me help you
Also, Signal’s centralization, sussy shenanigans with mobilecoin and not updating their server app repo for over a year (latter they ceased afterwards iirc but still very detrimental to trust, especially since git reflog manipulation is ridiculously easy) and dependence on proprietary libraries and network services (in case of libraries there are thankfully at least a couple forks without such dependencies). Plus most of their servers that aren’t necessarily CDN being located in glowieland…
The huge red flag to me is that Signal is no longer decried as the devil of western intelligence anymore.
Frank Figliuzzi (former FBI cointel) and Chuck Rosenberg (former DEA admin) used to rail on about all of the dangers posed by Signal, but I haven’t heard an unkind word in over a couple years now.
French authorities consider it a “terrorist app”. Louis Rossmann made a video about it. It was in some court case but at this point I don’t remember whether it was a local court or higher and frankly don’t care enough to check.
We each make a choice according to our level of comfort in concern to privacy, or lack thereof, in how we choose to conduct ourselves afforded by the solutions we utilize and the rituals we observe.
Remember, privacy can never be enforced or guaranteed, only encouraged. Best practices, as available, as it were.
No worries, it seems like you understand perfectly - I was just reflecting on the downvotes above.
I like it here because the people often seem real, and the voting generally seems (to me, anyway) to follow more of a meritocratic pattern than whatever the fuck has been going on at the other place for the last ten or more years.
We should probably try to really understand these differences so we might get better at designing communities that are actually sustainable. Maybe I am just getting old - I’m tired of starting over, I’m tired of watching great communities self-destruct.
Likely because while simplex looks great and is very promising, it doesn’t add much to the conversation here. Signal is primarily a replacement for SMS/MMS, this means people generally would want their contacts readily available and discoverable to minimize the friction of securely messaging friends/family. Additionally it’s dangerous to be recommending a service that hasn’t been audited nor proven itself secure over time.
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