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.
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.
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:
what’s the benefit? What does anyone get that they can’t get for free elsewhere?
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.
Even with the servers (selfhosted/soccer), you’ve made some tragic decisions.
What are your community ambitions?
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.)
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.
I agree with you so much that I don’t even understand where this criticism is coming from. I’ve written multipleblogposts 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”.
Going back to the football stuff, have you even messaged the mods of the football communities and offered to host them?
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.
I know this, you know this. But there’s things called hedged leveraging and acceptable loss.
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.
This is important.
What are my community ambitions with these instances? Honestly, none.
So why should someone trust you? You’re not emotionally involved nor committed.
I still stand by the idea that having content mirrored from reddit is better than having no content at all
So an RSS feed? Why does anyone need you then?
The first plan is to let anyone create communities on fediverser-enabled instances (even if they don’t have an account there)
Bad idea.
Community Ambassadors
Yes, you need people who are personally invested in order to build local and wider Fediverse communities.
I agree with you so much that I don’t even understand where this criticism is coming from. I’ve written multipleblogposts 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”.
You did a post and someone said, “you know you’re describing nostr” and that made me chuckle
I don’t even understand where this criticism is coming from.
It’s not personal criticism, it’s more observation and clash of ideals. I would prefer to see 20 small but equally active communities about baking, over one on the biggest instance. I wholeheartedly believe people need to get used to traveling around the Fediverse but also building up the communities they’re a member of.
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.
Not the Reddit moderators, the Lemmy World ones.
So…
what’s the benefit? What does anyone get that they can’t get for free elsewhere?
Hi, my name is Raphael. My passions are a decentralized open social web and web administration. Luckily, these two come together beautifully. It’s because they’re such a marriage made in heaven that I am able to offer the services I can. If you want to host Fediverse services without any of the hassle that comes with such an endeavor, get in touch or if you’re simply someone that wants a guarantee that your instance won’t disappear, get in touch.
I’m getting the feeling that you are talking about things that more specific to Fediverser (the tools to help migration from Reddit to Lemmy, which is mostly an open source project) than Communick (which is a professional hosting service). But anyway.
You’re not emotionally involved nor committed.
My email provider is not “emotionally involved or committed” to my emails. Yet, I still trust them they will do their best to keep me using their services.
So an RSS feed?
An RSS feed does not provide the possibility to interact with the post. There were a good number of conversations between Lemmy users that got started off a mirrored Reddit post.
(Letting users create communities on topic-instances) Bad idea.
Why?
“you know you’re describing nostr”
Which is a myopic take. Nostr has a fundamental issue around identity management. They went too far to the other direction in the decentralization spectrum and will never be able to reach mainstream appeal. The only companies that are going to support it are (unsurprisingly) the ones that are owned or financed by Jack.
What I am proposing is still based around ActivityPub and doesn’t throw the baby with the bathwater. Much like identity should not be coupled with the server running it, identity should not be coupled with your cryptographic keys.
I would prefer to see 20 small but equally active communities about baking, over one on the biggest instance.
What you “prefer” has little to do with what people want. I agree that we should strive to spread around different instances, but what is the benefit of having groups with similar interests spread around different communities? If these “similar interests” turn out to not be so similar after all, sure then they can and should branch out. But I don’t understand what is the value of favoring an explosion of content spread around. Content discovery is already the biggest challenge in the Fediverse, by fragmenting more than needed we end up with a bunch of people just yelling in their rooms to themselves.
Not the Reddit moderators, the Lemmy World ones.
That’s a given. I also promoted it on New Communities. I also made posts announcing the instances. I also asked people here to join. I’m still posting whatever content I think is relevant to these spaces.
My email provider is not “emotionally involved or committed” to my emails. Yet, I still trust them they will do their best to keep me using their services.
Isn’t that why we have a duopoly when it comes to email providers? The thing with the Fediverse is that we’re trying to change the culture of how people think and use the Internet. We need them to feel like they’re part of it and they own it and big tech doesn’t have the right to rape and pillage our contributions and privacy for it.
An RSS feed does not provide the possibility to interact with the post. There were a good number of conversations between Lemmy users that got started off a mirrored Reddit post.
But you were unable to grow. Is the world’s most expensive restaurant worth anything if a handful of people only visited once?
Why?
Ownership, commitment, dedication. All the basic foundational community building stuff. If they can’t even be arsed enough to create a login in order to make a community, why would you trust them to run that community? If the communities aren’t successful, how will they attract users? Without users, how will the communities be successful? Without a flagship experience, how do you drum up business? Without customers, how long can you continue to offer hosting services?
What I am proposing is still based around ActivityPub and doesn’t throw the baby with the bathwater. Much like identity should not be coupled with the server running it, identity should not be coupled with your cryptographic keys.
There’s better uses of your time rather than worrying about the design of ActivityPub.
what is the benefit of having groups with similar interests spread around different communities?
Is there only one pub in your town?
That’s a given. I also promoted it on New Communities. I also made posts announcing the instances. I also asked people here to join. I’m still posting whatever content I think is relevant to these spaces.
I dunno, when I asked one of the moderators of one of the football specific communities to mirror his posts on your football instance, he said he’d never heard of it.
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.
I like the idea of Sublinks for this reason. They wanted to create a Lemmy alternative, but they are maintaining Lemmy API compatibility. That way they build one piece at a time. The Lemmy frontend Tesseract was forked from Photon, and then became the Sublinks front end. But it’s still also a Lemmy frontend because they work with the same API structure.
In addition, Lemmy apps all work with Sublinks as well.
This way, they could focus on just the backend component, and rely on Lemmy components for the other pieces until they are able to get everything in house. Though they have a plan to keep Lemmy API compatibility, so there will always be this big pile of apps and web frontends that can be used with both.
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.
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.
I know this, you know this. But there’s things called hedged leveraging and acceptable loss.
This is important.
So why should someone trust you? You’re not emotionally involved nor committed.
So an RSS feed? Why does anyone need you then?
Bad idea.
Yes, you need people who are personally invested in order to build local and wider Fediverse communities.
You did a post and someone said, “you know you’re describing nostr” and that made me chuckle
It’s not personal criticism, it’s more observation and clash of ideals. I would prefer to see 20 small but equally active communities about baking, over one on the biggest instance. I wholeheartedly believe people need to get used to traveling around the Fediverse but also building up the communities they’re a member of.
Not the Reddit moderators, the Lemmy World ones.
So…
Something along those lines.
I’m getting the feeling that you are talking about things that more specific to Fediverser (the tools to help migration from Reddit to Lemmy, which is mostly an open source project) than Communick (which is a professional hosting service). But anyway.
My email provider is not “emotionally involved or committed” to my emails. Yet, I still trust them they will do their best to keep me using their services.
An RSS feed does not provide the possibility to interact with the post. There were a good number of conversations between Lemmy users that got started off a mirrored Reddit post.
Why?
Which is a myopic take. Nostr has a fundamental issue around identity management. They went too far to the other direction in the decentralization spectrum and will never be able to reach mainstream appeal. The only companies that are going to support it are (unsurprisingly) the ones that are owned or financed by Jack.
What I am proposing is still based around ActivityPub and doesn’t throw the baby with the bathwater. Much like identity should not be coupled with the server running it, identity should not be coupled with your cryptographic keys.
What you “prefer” has little to do with what people want. I agree that we should strive to spread around different instances, but what is the benefit of having groups with similar interests spread around different communities? If these “similar interests” turn out to not be so similar after all, sure then they can and should branch out. But I don’t understand what is the value of favoring an explosion of content spread around. Content discovery is already the biggest challenge in the Fediverse, by fragmenting more than needed we end up with a bunch of people just yelling in their rooms to themselves.
That’s a given. I also promoted it on New Communities. I also made posts announcing the instances. I also asked people here to join. I’m still posting whatever content I think is relevant to these spaces.
Isn’t that why we have a duopoly when it comes to email providers? The thing with the Fediverse is that we’re trying to change the culture of how people think and use the Internet. We need them to feel like they’re part of it and they own it and big tech doesn’t have the right to rape and pillage our contributions and privacy for it.
But you were unable to grow. Is the world’s most expensive restaurant worth anything if a handful of people only visited once?
Ownership, commitment, dedication. All the basic foundational community building stuff. If they can’t even be arsed enough to create a login in order to make a community, why would you trust them to run that community? If the communities aren’t successful, how will they attract users? Without users, how will the communities be successful? Without a flagship experience, how do you drum up business? Without customers, how long can you continue to offer hosting services?
There’s better uses of your time rather than worrying about the design of ActivityPub.
Is there only one pub in your town?
I dunno, when I asked one of the moderators of one of the football specific communities to mirror his posts on your football instance, he said he’d never heard of it.
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 like the idea of Sublinks for this reason. They wanted to create a Lemmy alternative, but they are maintaining Lemmy API compatibility. That way they build one piece at a time. The Lemmy frontend Tesseract was forked from Photon, and then became the Sublinks front end. But it’s still also a Lemmy frontend because they work with the same API structure.
In addition, Lemmy apps all work with Sublinks as well.
This way, they could focus on just the backend component, and rely on Lemmy components for the other pieces until they are able to get everything in house. Though they have a plan to keep Lemmy API compatibility, so there will always be this big pile of apps and web frontends that can be used with both.