rglullis

joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
[–] rglullis 2 points 8 hours ago

Brutalinks does not have separate communities, so it works more like HackerNews/lobste.rs

[–] rglullis 1 points 8 hours ago

I agree with pretty much everything you are saying, but I disagree on the solution. I think that us insisting on the donation model is putting an artificial limit on further growth. It "works" for this 1M-2M MAU, but these numbers are not enough to attract other players and who might be willing to try different approaches.

I think we need to change the general mindset that we "need" the donation model to keep the people around, and flip to a system where every user is expected to pay a little bit. And yeah, you might argue that not everyone is able to afford it, but it would easier to come with systems where not-paying is the exception instead of the rule. We can have a system where every N paying subscribers guarantee one free spot, with N=2, 3, 5, 10, up to the admin. We can have a system (like I have in Communick) where customers can buy "multiple seats" and invite whoever they want. Alternatively, we can set up a Caffe sospeso system where donations are still accepted, but accounted directly for someone who wants to claim it.

[–] rglullis 1 points 12 hours ago

If we all donate a little bit to the project, their budget will be larger. If their budget is larger, they can get more steady collaborators.

And even if they can't get more people, by helping them we show we value all the work they have done already.

[–] rglullis 3 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Then you charge by default and carve out exceptions to those who can't afford. Instead of having 2% of people donating and 98% of freeloaders, make it that every 5 paying subscribers guarantee one free spot. Alternatively, set up a Caffe sospeso system where donations are still accepted, but accounted directly for someone who wants to claim it.

There is really no excuse to keep the donation model as a rule.

[–] rglullis 3 points 18 hours ago

I am not disagreeing, I just think these options are not mutually exclusive. We should try all of those that we can. And while I can not force schools and universities to implement their own Mastodon instance for their students, I can pay a little bit per month to support developers and service providers of the libre platforms out there.

[–] rglullis 5 points 18 hours ago

I’m glad to see whales splashing about in the pond with the rest of us.

What "whale"? Communick costs less than $2.50 per month. It is less than the average donation people send around.

We ‘pay’ by adding content and being members of the community

No one can use your content to pay their bills.

We pay by expanding the network and being a negative to Reddit

The network is not expanding. It is stuck in this 1M-2M monthly active users (if you count all of the Fediverse) and Lemmy/kbin/piefed is hovering around 50-55k/MAU for two years already.

Meanwhile, Reddit's revenue has grown 62% in 2024 (from $800M in 2023 to to $1.3B last year). Do you really think they care about losing a few thousand users who are all talk but no bite?

It was the free hosting and free viewing that made YT a juggernaut.

There were other platforms offering free video and free hosting as well. There were even p2p alternatives. Remember Joost? It's not that people didn't have a choice then and YouTube was better. It's that could Google leveraged its capital to run Youtube at a loss for as long as needed until there was no competition left.

[–] rglullis 1 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

This is absurd and shows some ridiculous entitlement.

Software development is not just a drive-thru restaurant where people just make an order with their preferred menu, and 30 seconds later it is handed it out to you. Developers have to balance a bunch of priorities, deal with bugs, make sure that new features being added can be maintained in the future adequately. It's also not easy for anyone to just drop by and submit a huge piece of functionality without making sure things works as expected. And they are doing this all while getting basically no money in donations (~3000€/month, for 3 developers is less than minimum wage for pretty much all of Northern Europe).

If you think it's just a matter of "they don't care", go ahead and write the code yourself.

[–] rglullis 2 points 20 hours ago

It shut down because the admin team didn’t want to do it anymore.

It shut down because the admin team didn't want to do it for free anymore. There were just too many people, too many bad actors for little reward. By charging for access, you manage to both increase the reward and reduce the amount of people, so the whole equation changes significantly.

how does charging for access change anything? The owner could decide they have had enough, walk away, and shut everything down anyway, no?

Sure, but the amount of pain that I get from my ~50 paying customers is infinitely less than the headaches that you'll be getting.

[–] rglullis 2 points 20 hours ago

I didn't insult anyone. You are putting names out there of admins of existing instances when I was talking about the general story of about how there are constant wheel of new people coming up.

You are gasping as straws, as if ostracizing me would ever validate your arguments. This is getting tiring.

[–] rglullis 7 points 20 hours ago (1 children)
[–] rglullis 2 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

It's not about the software. I am just pointing out that Communick's instances are only available for paying customers, so his argument (everyone should pay a little bit) is at the very least backed by his own actions.

Regarding Peertube: I see the problem of Peertube on the other end of what you are saying. People are not using that much because even those that have a presence on PeerTube still depend on YouTube to make money. If PeerTube had a way to help with monetization, then more creators would be interested in publishing exclusively on PeerTube, even if they had to pay something to upload/distribute videos.

[–] rglullis 1 points 22 hours ago (8 children)

Ok, so you are not taking anything out of pocket at all? That's better than most, I suppose.

Still, during the interview you touch on the subject of how the donation model is not sustainable and it can only works at the scale that Fedi is right now. Wouldn't you consider then switching to a different model?

 

Bayern can understand the likes of Erling Haaland or Jude Bellingham deciding to leave the Bundesliga for top clubs outside of Germany – as they’re not German.But it’s the first time that a German player decided against Bayern.

 

This is my current understanding of the situation:

  • The admins are no longer interested in running the instance, due to increasing demand, missing moderation features and waves of abuse from external actors.
  • Transferring the instance to someone else is a complicated issue. Even though there is not a large amount of private information in Lemmy's database, you can not simply transfer the trust the users placed in the original admin to the new owner.
  • Lemmy still does not provide an easy way to migrate accounts

Given all the above, shutting down the instance seems to be the natural course of action. I'd like to propose an alternative: freeze the instance activity and keep it in some form of "read-only" mode until Lemmy matures.

What would that require?

  1. Take the instance down (no more incoming activities)
  2. Run a script that generates static json files for every actor (user, community), federated object (post, comment, report) and activity (like/dislike votes, announce activities, etc)
  3. Set up a static site to serve all that JSON.
  4. Take the media on pict-rs and move to some long-term back up system.
  5. (Optional, but could be helpful in the future) allow users to checkout the private keys of their own user and community actors.

This won't help solve the current problems and it wouldn't help with the users who now will have to move away to a new instance, but it could eventually help for users who want to restore the activity on a new server.

I've been experimenting with an implementation for Decentralized Identifiers for ActivityPub that can make it possible for people to move servers but maintain their identity (similar to bluesky's PLC directory), so perhaps we could have a future where users can fully migrate their accounts from server to server without requiring intervention from admins.

 

If you are affected by the shutting down of lemm.ee and understand that admins and mods need direct support in order to keep things running smoothly, consider joining communick.news.

It is different from the other instances in one crucial way: Instead of running with open registrations and hoping that the community can support it through donations, Communick charges a low yearly payment from every member. We believe that charging a little bit from everyone is fairer, simpler and more sustainable than the current system.

The usual plan is $29/year which gives access to our Lemmy, Mastodon, Matrix and Funkwhale but now there is a Lemmy-only special offer for $19/year.

Some tidbits about the instance:

Signing-up to the instance

  1. Go to https://communick.com/packages/access
  2. Select the "Lemmy (single account)" option if you want only an account at Lemmy or the "Full Access" if you are also interested in Mastodon (microblogging), Matrix (messaging) and Funkwhale (music streaming). Your trial will start the moment you complete sign up at the portal.
  3. Complete the sign-up for Lemmy at https://communick.news/signup. Lemmy is the only one of Communick's services that does not support Single-Sign On, so please use the same username you've used on the portal.
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