I’ve starting working on a lemmy front end called lemmy-ui-leptos using leptos, a Rust UI framework with isomorphic support, and tailwind + daisyUI for the component styling. This could eventually replace the frankenstein’s monster that lemmy-ui has become.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] rglullis 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

the supposition that there is no cost on delivery.

The absolute opposite, actually. There is a cost to content distribution and for the maintenance of the service beyond the servers. Moderation, system administration, bug fixing, security research, optimizations in storage...

Putting up a server is the easy part. Ensuring that it can serve its users well, not so much. To do it properly, it becomes a part-time job. Now that there is an element of novelty to it, we will see many people sticking around to this work, but as the novelty wears off, they will either treat it like work or stop doing it altogether. We can see that happening already with Mastodon.

[–] cakeistheanswer@lemmy.fmhy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

The reality is you already know there are people to do much of that job. A local ran a BBS for a town of 15k where I lived growing up. The moderators at Reddit were never paid, but they did it.

Point taken they whether they will do it here, but I think the descent from ubiquity to hobbyism again might do social media some good.

I've been through the collapse of the last vestiges of both Usenet and independent message boards, so I'm familiar with the perils of funding, and the deceptive costs of free. But wikipedia lives, hell even headfi still lives, there is a place within any market to be carried by it's enthusiastic.