Sadly thats fediverse, instance come and go as they like. Because behind them are humans that do this in their freetime ( most of the time out of their own pocket ). Big respect to everyone hosting a federated instance.
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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Fediverse
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It shouldn't be like this. If we keep treating the Fediverse as just a scrappy, amateur effort, it will never reach its full potential and it will be forever just a niche thing.
I actually kind of enjoy the "scrappy diy effort niche" thing.
it's fine if you want to have it as a hobby. It's not fine if you want to destroy Big Tech.
Well, I guess it's priorities. Destroying Big Tech would be pretty nice, but I'm really just here for the community.
Not to single you out, but this attitude is unbelievably frustrating. Everyone here loves to waste hours of their day signaling their virtue and complaining about all the evils done by the corporations, but so few are actually willing to put any skin in the game. they complain about entshittication from Spotify and Netflix, but religiously continue paying their subscriptions while refusing to support smaller, independent businesses.
I mean, you are not entitled to people being soldiers in your war against Big Tech. Like, I'd be totally for it, but some other time, nowadays I'm resting and being creative. Speaking of, not everyone here laps the crotch of Spotify et al. I'm a proud (but modest) pirate.
I wasn't the one starting the protests against Reddit, and I am not the screaming at my computer whenever Elon Musk says something completely stupid.
I just thought that after all these years, more people have understood what "when you don't pay for the product, you are the product" really meant.
The fediverse will never destroy big tech unfortunately. In their worst case, they will incorporate it and easily dominate.
If not completely destroy it, at least make it irrelevant for those who want to avoid it.
The FOSS movement never destroyed Microsoft, but it arguably made it possible for us to live in a world where Bill Gates owned every PC software that we run.
In my opinion, the fediverse as it exists today is very vulnerable to domination by big tech. The only reason it hasn't happened yet is it is too small for them to care that much.
If the fediverse ever becomes mainstream, big tech will dominate it. If we want to fight big tech, we need to rethink our strategy and the fediverse, because right now, the fediverse is not ready to take it on.
How would that happen? If the core idea of "the Fediverse" is to have a loosely-connected network of servers and applications speaking a common protocol, how is it that they would use to "dominate" it?
I am not saying that Big Tech couldn't try to use it "open wash" their solutions, like Facebook and Google did with XMPP before. But what I am saying is that (like XMPP) I think it's virtually impossible for them to "dominate" something that is open.
I'm also not saying that the software we have is ready for the masses (it isn't) but all the issues I see are just a matter of implementation, not a fundamental design flaw.
There's several vulnerabilities:
- the fediverse unfortunately remains quite centralized. Most users wanna join the big servers. If it wasn't for the big servers literally driving people away, we would've been even more centralized
- most people have no issue with corporate presence in the fediverse. They're okay with blue sky and okay with threads. In fact, clearly Gargaron is okay with meta and threads.
- big tech already has a federated server that dwarves the rest of the fediverse combined: threads. Yes it's still not quite there yet, but if they complete its federation, they will dominate it.
- gargaron showed he's okay selling out to Meta. What prevents another instance admin? A corporation could easily offer enough money to a handful of instance admins and control all these instances.
This is not answering my question, or we have different ideas of what it means to dominate.
80% of email traffic is either Gmail or Outlook, yet none of Big Tech is able to control it fully. They can not force you to use their email server, and smaller providers still exist and are actually healthy business.
Is it hard to run an email by yourself? Yes. Is it impossible? Absolutely not. To me, that is what matters.
Then yes indeed were thinking differently. To me, email has already lost to big tech. The technical possibility of hosting email is there, but you can't even reach most users of the world without a lot of work.
What is your idea of "a lot of work"? Because I am perfectly happy with my $19/year service from migadu.com.
But you can already see the hurdles of large instance like lemmy.world.
The costs are so immense (probably because of some unoptimized code), the software isnt "ripe" enough that it can be left alone for few months and have it run smoothly. It needs permanent monitoring and maintenance. And that doesnt even go into the moderation issues.
Aren't you kind of making my point?
I am saying that the Fediverse will only be sustainable if everyone pays a little bit. Relying on a few generous souls to make up for the thousands of freeloaders will always take every instance to a ceiling which is, frankly speaking, very low. LW has 18k MAU. This number is laughably low for any social network.
I don't know exactly what happened. But I'm guessing he was doxxed and bullied by activists based on this post https://tenforward.social/@zyd/113086796304683411
That sucks
I totally get where they're coming from with that shutdown announcement. I've had to "talk myself off a ledge" a few times to not go the same route and shut mine down. Ended up making some server policy changes that helped, but there's eventually going to be something else later.
If we keep treating the Fediverse as just a scrappy, amateur effort, it will never reach its full potential and it will be forever just a niche thing.
What suggestions do you have to change the way we're treating/running it currently?
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"No such thing as a free lunch" (alternatively, "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch", "There is no such thing as a free lunch" or other variants, sometimes called Crane's law[1]) is a popular adage communicating the idea that it is impossible to get something for nothing. **The acronyms TANSTAAFL, TINSTAAFL, and TNSTAAFL are also used. **
You are right about the "under", though. I "accidently half a word", there. Will fix.
Then again, the Emacs server is not shutting down over costs. It's shutting down because the admin is tired of dealing with assholes on the internet.
Sure, you could pay people to do that as well, or maybe preferably, better tools need to be developed to ease the burden of individual instance admins. But this specific case is explicitly not about server costs.
"There's no such thing as free lunch" is a stupidity. There is. You have soup kitchens all over the world, the volunteers working for them do so because it gives them meaning, and they are often provided ingredients for free from supermarkets that would otherwise end in the trash.
It's a dumb metaphor that doesn't even work in the original example. There is more to life than capitalism.
That didn't mean nobody should pay. I make monthly donations to my Mastodon instance, and will probably branch out soon to support to other services I use as well. But everything is not always about money.
Then again, the Emacs server is not shutting down over costs. It’s shutting down because the admin is tired of dealing with assholes on the internet.
Sure, you could pay people to do that as well, or maybe preferably, better tools need to be developed to ease the burden of individual instance admins. But this specific case is explicitly not about server costs.
Thank you for pointing this out
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I believe in co-op instance management solution like beehaw uses.
$2.00/year would mean i would require 200 active paying users per year. thats not too bad
the world as it is with its twitter/reddit is survivor bias. so many other social media sites have come and gone, why would the fediverse be any different?
eventually it will be instances who solved for the long-term problems of financial solubility and technical maintenance requirements.
Should have used Vim instead, that's a real text editor. No-one who starts using it ever moves on to something else.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux is actually Emacs plus Linux. Linux alone is not an operating system. It's just one component of a fully functioning Emacs system made useful by the Elisp interpreter, buffer editor, and vital system components comprising a full OS.
Some computer users run a modified version of the Emacs system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of Emacs which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the Emacs system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is used in combination with the Emacs operating system; the whole system is basically Emacs with Linux added. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of Emacs plus Linux!
There seems to be another side to this story as well. I'm not quite invested enough to dig into it, but it might not be such an awful loss.
Good find!
I was surprised I never heard of it, had a look, it's a Mastodon instance, so that makes sense.
Yeah, I don't really care for micro blogging.
Quick archive it All
Use archive.is or archive.org
If this later returns as ed.ch (more streamlined and lightweight, minimal featureset, perhaps not even the ability to store remote files so as to avoid the CSAM issues, etc) it'll be The Day.
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