I’m having to register to Lemmy directly now, when I’m used to posting from KBin’s instance. But now the errors is getting so bothersome that I can’t even surf around currently on it. The 50x error comes up after everytime I post somewhere, like make a thread.
The current admin is dealing with issues at the moment and can’t always be there, which is unfortunate because it sets up KBin and it’s magazines to be contaminated with bots, spam and other problems.
I have to unsubscribe from some of kbin’s magazines because bots constantly posting spam there in past few months. It’s bad. I didn’t know the dev runs double duty as mod as well.
I unsubscribed from kbin for that exact reason a bit earlier. I‘m sad the platform is suffering and the person taking care of it is overwhelmed.
It does show the fundamental flaw of foss software. People should really donate even small amounts to these platforms so they can afford more dev time.
I feel like this needs to be addressed soon in general, not only in this case.
We do need to create a culture of donations within the FOSS community. But we also need to get real with our expectations. People don’t realise how much time and effort has gone into Lemmy to where it is. People think that creating an alternative is quick and easy and it’s not. Honestly, for more people, their time would be better invested in creating an alternative front-end rather than a whole new piece of software. A one person development team just isn’t sustainable for 99% of projects. New software takes a lot of time to get to a state where it’s ready.
I agree 100%. Still, I dont think most people will donate until they have to and this will lock those out who cant and drive those away who rather sell their privacy. Maybe lemmy (and other foss) should go full wikipedia mode and have banners all over the place until you donate even a dollar. I donate 1$ a week (not the only project I donate to either).
Then, on the other hand countries should have programmes to fund this kind of stuff and it should just happen by user count.
What do you think would be a viable option?
I keep coming back to the idea of cooperatives. If say me, you and three other people all use Lemmy and Mastodon, what’s to stop us putting £10 into a pot monthly to pay for hosting and the domain. I don’t think the problem is the willingness, I think its just the culture. We need to build the culture up of people investing in their freedom and autonomy. We need to build the infrastructure for cooperatives to thrive.
I also like think we should have governments donating towards hosting and teaching people about self hosting. Whether on a VPS or in home.
Thats exactly what I do. A couple of friends use my vps and it has many fediverse services running with 99% uptime.
They throw some dollars my way and I kick a share to the devs and other software that runs this place. I‘m also putting in hours to improve the software and coming up with ideas how to distribute the money better.
What we need is better organization. People need to know about this, talk about it and make plans together imo.
Well there you have it. You are the blueprint!
I offer Lemmy, Mastodon, Matrix and Funkwhale for $29 per year. People don’t need to worry about anything. It is more capital efficient and resource efficient than hundreds of small “cooperatives” running around.
And if you want to have your own domain, I also provide access to the Fediverse via Takahe for $39/year. If I had more customers, I’d be able to use this money to fund its development further and make it compatible with Lemmy’s API as well.
Honestly, I am doing a really poor job at marketing or people are not really willing to put their money where they mouths are.
I’m actually a fan of the service you offer, but yeah, you suck at execution.
First of all, what you offer is a hosting service and that’s very different from a cooperative. A cooperative is however many people with equal ownership and obviously equal managerial oversight. This, what a cooperative is, is emotional involvement.
Your hosting service for example, is, essentially you saying asking people to pay you so they don’t have to worry about anything. Problem is, outside of guilt/a sense of responsibility, what’s the benefit? What does anyone get that they can’t get for free elsewhere?
Even with the servers you offer, you’ve made some tragic decisions. Like main@topic.tld. That’s just a basic mistake. It’s confusing. Main/Meta are always reserved for Meta discussion, so already you’re creating friction and learning curve where none needs to be. selfhosted/selfhosting/selfhost@selfhosted.forum is far more clear than main@selfhosted.forum and actually inspires people to have a look at the topics. We also have to ask, what makes your one better than others? What are your community ambitions? These are the type of questions that need to be asked. Recently, you were tagged by blaze in a topic where he asked your thoughts about hosting the euro24 communities over on soccer.forum and you totally, at least when I checked, didn’t respond. Now if you had spoken up, perhaps you could’ve had more people posting on your instance and once they’re there, they can see sidebars talking about paying for the Fediverse suite. But going back to selfhosted, when I posted about creating a new one, you said we shouldn’t fragment the conversation. Where what you should’ve said is that you have a community that does things differently. I’m very vocal about the fact that I feel having so much of the community centred around Lemmy world is bad for Lemmy and bad for the Fediverse. Not because they’re bad, but because centralization is bad. We need more decentralization and we need to get more people used to traveling off server and curating their subscriptions, that’s not going to happen with people like yourself trying to herd people towards federation. Going back to the football stuff, have you even messaged the mods of the football communities and offered to host them? But yeah, if we’re talking just hosting, you need to figure out what makes you special and content/communities is a good place to start.
I know it sounds harsh, but honestly, I bothered to write all this because I’m rooting for you. I want to see a sustainable Fediverse.
Finally, some useful feedback. Thank you! Some points valid, others not so much:
There is no such thing as a free lunch. There are costs (countable and uncountable) to running an instance. If people don’t want to pay out of their pocket to have someone having the service, they will be subject to the whims of administrators, moderators who will be tired of dealing with thousands of reports, cases of developers burning out (just like the one here in this very post), etc, etc.
I don’t think any of my customers are paying me “out of guilt”. I think that they understand that their time is valuable, they don’t want to deal with this shit and my service provides them more value than the amount of money they give me.
What are my community ambitions with these instances? Honestly, none. I did not start these topic-based instances to grow all these communities or to lead this effort. My hope was to take a supporting role, help with technical coordination, figure out issues with the software that are stopping wider adoption, etc. I first created selfhosted because that subreddit was one of the few that was seriously considering moving out of Reddit, and I am on record actually offering the domain to them. They didn’t take the offer, so I decided to run it and (at the time) use as a test bed for my work on infrastructure stuff and the fediverser mirrors.
There were indeed some bad calls on this. First, it took me a while to realize that these if no one could join these instances, then no one would be able to create their own community. Second, I was pushing for the mirrors even in places where I was not actually participating, and while I still stand by the idea that having content mirrored from reddit is better than having no content at all, I also accept that all those bots were a net negative for the fediverse as a whole.
Now that I got the grant from NLNet, I will work on fixing these mistakes. The first plan is to let anyone create communities on fediverser-enabled instances (even if they don’t have an account there) and it will just require an approval from the admin. Second, I am replacing the bots with “Community Ambassadors” who will be able to reach out and integrate with the existing subreddits in ways that they feel more appropriate
(Lastly, I did respond to Blaze afterwards, I just don’t know why I didn’t get the notification in the first place.)
I agree with you so much that I don’t even understand where this criticism is coming from. I’ve written multiple blog posts arguing for a less server-centered approach to these open social media platforms, to the point that starting to drop “Fediverse” from my vocabulary and calling it “Open Social Web”.
I did. I also wrote to the mods of /r/nba and /r/nfl, because I also created instances for that. I got zero responses. The lesson I learned here: with very few exceptions, the mods of really popular subreddits are too high on their power-trip and do not want to risk anything by moving out.
The problem here is that people conflate “Free as in Speech” with “Free as in Beer”. Free Software was never about “not charging” or “pay what you want” or “donation based”. It’s about freedom to access and modify the software code if you want to do so.
The majority of people here don’t want or don’t care about this. They just want a convenient way to shitpost online. They want someone else to thanklessly devote their time and resources to the “community”, but don’t you dare thinking about making money from this.
This need to change. If we want an internet free of big corporations and focused on the interests of “the people”, then “the people” (all of them!) need to be willing to put something on the line and fund it.
I dont think thats gonna fly, honestly. We also need people to vote pro people and pro planet instead of pro billionaires or pro nationalism.
I also dont think its helpful to throw shit at the people using the software because thats how we know the software is good.
Imo, we should implement systems that fund software that attracts users without it using predatory marketing and privacy invasive. Ideally we just push taxes for large companies higher and give the funds to foss devs who attract most users/uses of their software/libraries. That should do the trick.
Speaking as someone who just received a grant from NLNet: I’m glad such a thing exists and I’m grateful for the funds I’m getting which will allow me to pay my bills for a couple of months. But if you told me 5 years ago (when I started working on Communick) that to make a living as a software developer I’d have to depend on the whims of bureaucrats who are playing with money that is not their own, I’d just go apply to Google or go back to my Big Corp.
Centralized economies do not work. Like everything else in the world, the best measure we have to determine if software is “good” is by putting a price on it and seeing how much people want to pay for it.
Also, it’s important to point out that this does not mean that we need VC, big corporate structure or any corrupt institution to work. There are indie devs making a killing (50/70/100k€ per month) on their own because they are building something that is valuable and are not shy from charging what they know what their work is worth.