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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Thanks, appreciate the insight. I did not consider that and am still trying to get grasp of things.

    I mentioned Pat & Theo as it seems on the few occasions they do reach out to keep the servers running beyond current donations, people do reach out to help with running costs. People don’t jump ship and the community persists for decades.

    If a linux distro is struggling to keep up, freeloading users will often jump ship too. Linux isn’t short on distros to choose from or small community distros that died.

    I’m not sure what you provide…what is the advantage to using your service over just deploying a lemmy or mastodon instance on any cloud service?



  • I’d prefer communities and instances focus on providing clear mission statements, support commitments, community guidelines and working on what is possible with what we have. I’d hope that much of the work being done on the Lemmy code over the coming year or so is cve’s, bugfixes, mod tools, scalability & further integration with other areas of the fediverse.

    A financial health bar sounds like a lot of work to add and a lot of work for people running an instance to commit to keeping up to date for little gain, or possibly negative gain. Most businesses struggle to provide accounts every year or two and this would likely involve international market and crypto integration alongside converting donated or removeded hardware, hosting and maybe most importantly labour given freely. Real time financial reports for thousands of open source social instances seems wild. To make a personal instance appear green I’d need to show the running cost of ~3.72% of my server and then donate to my own instance and publish it, even then it might be red for half the month if I don’t get my direct debit date in sync.

    A lot of money changing hands on Reddit was mods being bribed to promote content, we’d need a bar for that here too so we can see how corrupt the mods of each instance are. Maybe a light/dark bar showing declared and undeclared funding.

    Prosperity is often linked to abrupt change.

    In my experience of open source over the past decade or so often the most reliable projects over the longterm are those with a focus on code & community, not finance. If the finances go too far into the red they will ask the community for support. Pat’s Slackware or Theo’s OpenBSD seems like good examples, they are beyond dependable and the finance model seems to involve ignoring it until the lights are about to go off and then asking the community for help. Gentoo & Debian for the community approach.

    A small instance with a dedicated admin and a solid community behind the admin that’s currently losing money may be more likely to be still growing and thriving in a few years than a huge instance at the moment with an admin focused on the short term financial possibilities of another mass Reddit migration next week.



  • Working between servers.

    Just simple stuff like searching, adding, customizing feeds. Clicking an alert to take me to the content will take me to a server I’m not logged into and I need to go back and find the same post via my own server to comment. Not the end of the world for me but likely a big issue for many potential users if the are use to mainstream social media that ‘just works’.


  • I’m not sure the ‘like email’ thing helps.

    Email is confusing and not what most people use to connect with others. I don’t know anyone who met via email.

    Trying to get groups of people to connect meaningfully over email didn’t work. Messenger apps did work as they removed user freedom to top-reply and break everything.

    I’m vaguely interested in IT, seflhost a little and compile a kernel from time to time but email still seems esoteric and confusing to me.

    Join the fediverse! It’s as simple as setting up an email server!


  • Good points.

    I’ll be going back to Reddit too but I suspect everything will not be as it once was and much of it will be finding out where others have fled to.

    There was ~1-5000 people on here over the last year or so which isn’t huge in terms of subreddits, it seems to have jumped to 100,000+ in the past week or two. Teh current content seems reasonable for an ~100k subreddit.


  • I love Linux, been using it daily for well over a decade but simple stuff people take for granted like gaming, drivers, wi-fi, touchpads, secureboot, Adobe, Office, printing and device syncing alongside the ever ongoing dependency hell can be an issue for some.

    I don’t think I’ve met anyone else in meatspace who uses Linux as a desktop or laptop. Installing a novel OS isn’t something people tend to do and comes with risks.

    The worry is that Lemmy is then not so much a replacemt for Reddit and more of replacement for r/Linux and related subs.

    Whilst it’s nice to go online and tell people how amazing and easy I’m finding it is running Gentoo on old hardware with public binhosts I would also like access to a majority of communities who won’t know what that means.