Lemmy is CEO-proof. After Digg, Reddit and Twitter, that term should be a thing

I think pitching in a dollar every year is preferable. Heck, I even pay much more to Youtube to get rid of advertisements. But it does pose a significant threshold for new users.

A hybrid model doesn’t sound too bad to me, where you can pay for an ad free server.

They are popular, because it's a way to squeeze out extra money out of the users (often in addition to paying for the product) and since the software is proprietary the users often can't do anything about it.

Btw notice how most youtubers turned into salesmen that want to sell you something in each video and their sponsored segments are often minutes long.

your post is very interesting for me to consider

The ad industry is really secretive in general. There aren't many studies proving that targeted advertising even works. If the data was even slightly in the ad industry's favor, they'd release it. Their entire job is spinning things to look good.

I suspect that targeted advertising was invented to justify the existence of advertising companies as middlemen. Take for example the ExplainXKCD wiki. They just serve their own ads which are usually for tech products trying to reach Sysadmins. If every company did this, the ad industry would wilt.

Self funding or donations

Something that makes forums a bit different is that it costs the owners when people use the website. Unlike Blender, Firefox, Linux, etc… A server host can’t just make the forum available, then set and forget it, they either have to pay a huge fee to some host like AWS, or have a huge stockpile of computers in their basement.

The difference is you cited software projects, not hosted infrastructure. A person can contribute to a FOSS dev project and not incur expenses dependent on end-users activity. Hosting a fediverse application isn't like that, somebody has to pay for the hosting and the hosting expenses will scale with user activity.

Back in 2008 I met a bunch of the VLC devs at a KDE related open source software conference. They talked about their experiences getting approached by companies with "fuck you" levels of money with offers they couldn't refuse -- and yet refused. In 2008 it was about bundling spyware with installers, largely. I always admired their stalwart refusal to bend.

Side note: this was shortly after they'd completed their transition to Qt as their toolkit. They stole their little volume control widget from KDE's media player, Amarok. The beauty of open-source and cross pollenation. I expect Lemmy and kbin and others in the fediverse will freely cross pollenate too. In the end, open source wins.

The difference is that it's a hosted platform. This might an issue and if making it a pay only service doesn't come around, ads will. If that happens I'm outta here.

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I would prefer that ads NOT be the same as regular posts to prevent people from mistaking promoted ads for actual content. Reddit was really bad about this, you would click a thing thinking it was legitimate only to find out it was an ad after the fact. I want my content and my ads to remain separate. They need to be clearly marked (not stealthily marked like on reddit), the ratio of ads to content should heavily favor content, and they need to be dismissible.

Maybe admins could start with opt-in ads that they ask if you want when you create an account? Very few people would accept them but some would and even tho it wouldn't cover the costs it could help a bit. You definitely shouldn't just enable ads for all tho

To put a finer point on it, that's precisely why it's important for Free Software to be copyleft rather than merely permissively-licensed. (And for it to either have a trustworthy copyright holder, like the Free Software Foundation or similar non-profit, or to have too many copyright holders to make changing the license tractable.)

Wow, I thought Emby was also open source. Why would anyone pay for and install Emby when Plex is around as the closed-source "standard"? You pick Jellyfin for FOSS, you pick Plex for "It just works" and because it's the known name in the scene. Why would you pick a non-FOSS Emby?

I'd say it's still behest to the benevolent dictator but it's easier to switch to another if one goes bad. Lemmy.world is up to 150k users. It's a main instance now and Ruud is providing server space for us all to use. If he goes bad then someone else has to step up and provide server space for other instances to take up capacity.

Benevolent dictator is a software development term, that's why it's italicized. It's not literal

Yes they do. This is why some FOSS goes to places like Apache, why there's a Python foundation, Spark has Databricks, Kafka Confluent and Trino Starburst.

The good thing about open source is that it allows everyone to contribute code to the base. The bad thing about open source is thay it allows everyone to contribute code to the base.

You need repo maintainers, developers that are constant contributor, code reviewers, people maintaining CI CD Pipelines, etc etc.

Yes it's less than having proprietary, but it's nowhere near "0".

But how is the organization going to handle and review all this additional code? You can't just trust someone coded something correctly without reviewing the code.

Hey that's a lot of work for one dude. I'll be your associate. I shall be the ACAIIO and my salary is twice as much as yours because of the longer title

I didn’t know their version would use ActivityPub, that’s very interesting.

Very tiny, but I suspect that the ones that left are of higher than average quality.

It takes a long ass time for social media to die. Because the bulk of users just don't use it often.

Shit, Fark is still technically going.

There's millions of zombie reddit accounts and bots that will never be shut down.

What you need to pay attention to is the active user numbers.

LLMs are likely going to scrape no matter the license. I doubt OpenAI got a copyright license from Reddit to ingest it. In fact I'm not even sure they need one if ingestion can be make similar enough to "reading the web site". And so making content CC probably won't affect LLM use of public posts.

What license would be appropriate for that? I've always been interested since I do photography, and it seems like any site like that needs nearly full rights so that they can store and distribute as they see fit so that they can do backups, migration, etc. What license would give those, but keep the full rights of the creator intact?

(I know nothing on the topic, just curious)

That's a bit like saying "Yeah so we don't care what reddit does, because you can always go somewhere else"

It's the biggest instance, so it's where most of the community and content would be etc etc. Just like what happened with beehaw could happen to world as well. This is only true for a mature decentralized federated ecosystem with a lot of redundant communities so that if one goes down you can easily consume the same content from a different instence. Is that the case now? I would say no, so it's even less leader-proof.

It's definitely good, but it isn't full proof. Nothing is.

mmm someone is not vibbing would you like to go to lemmy.gulag ?

But isn't reddit still a private company? They don't have shareholders in that case right? They WANT shareholders which is why they're pulling this b.s to appear profitable when they go public. I think this is just plain old greed.

undefined> They are where they are for profit

Initially corporations were supposed to put the public good above profits. Now they have a legal obligation to put the interest of their shareholders above all else (usually interpreted as profits above all else). It was an unfortunate shift.

It's understandable for reddit to need money to continue functioning. That's never been the argument. The problem is how unreasonable the pricing is and how unwaverable they are about it.

I did say pretty much just that:

and they are usually paid in such a way to motivate shareholder benefits, like with stock instead of a high salary.

So if one instance goes to shit your account will still work on all the other ones.

My understanding is that (at present anyway) since accounts are not federated, your account on that "gone to shit" instance will be gone. Your content will still be on many federated instances, but not your account. That would be lost.

Ah... dope. So it's currently just running through donations I presume. Another dumb question: If an instance owner goes rogue and just nukes it are your posts gone too or is it archived somewhere?

So if a Lemmy instance goes down, all of the communities and comments go down with it? Seems almost worst than having a CEO?

Yeah I think that’s the best way to proceed. Also just found this which is really helpful for finding where people might have scattered.

https://sub.rehab/

Does it matter tho, couldn't people just develop tool to stop Meta so called threads from being seen across the fediverse? (I'm technologically illiterate so I really do know tbh)

The problem isn’t necessarily people monetizing a platform, it’s forcing everyone to participate in the monetization whether they want to or not.

If there was a hypothetical Lemmy instance that was ad-supported or even subscription-based, that would be fine. Because we always have the choice to go to a different instance.

That's not entirely true. Plenty of FLOSS software exist that are also run by corporations.

The secret is that corporate FLOSS maintainers are "service providers" and make their living that way, but the code is a public-access creative output that allows others to render that service.

It's a somewhat implicit contract of saying "Live and let live, since I'm technically have more power strictly because I designed the darn thing." Sorta scratches the ego and also allows freedom for everyone else at the same time.

Yeah, same thing that happened when gab started a Mastodon instance, everyone immediately defederated from them for being Nazis and their reach stayed confined to only their own platform. Deplatforming is never completely stripping a platform from a person/group, it's more of a quarantine. Keep them isolated from the wider community so they can't recruit new members, and their groups wither

I mean, if it's real bad shit like violence, that's where FBI comes in, right?

Not sure if the ACLU would be able to do anything about hate speech.

But bad actors would have to run a shell game of go between instances to recruit. And they've been doing that shit for decades anyways. Hell, it's the same thing as under 18 punk shows back in the day when nazis hung in the parking lot trying to give booze/drugs to kids.

Like, imagine if someone said we can't have phones because assholes can also buy a phone...

That and more all exist in Fediverse already. https://jointhefediverse.net/join

Right? Currently if an instance fails then all the communities hosted on that instance and comments are essentially 'gone' correct?

TL;DR: Yeah, I 100% agree, if everyone had a strong safety net, we'd be much better off.

When it works it works. I mean I have met several people who've expressed a lot of sincere dissatisfaction with the VA's medical services, including limited access to mental healthcare among other things. Particularly of concern is the high degree of veterans who end up on the street--many with severe mental health issues, with some even self-medicating and/or dealing with addictions.

Of course, I'm sure there are more factors that contribute to homeless veterans than limited accessibility to medical care, mental healthcare, and other social services provided by the VA--but it is important to consider.

..and of course, as you are aware, it's better to have those social systems in-place than nothing at all. Even when run to a degree of mediocrity, socialist programs can and do tend to benefit a population. While not everyone may like the Supplemental Security Income and FAFSA programs: without them, I wouldn't be able to attend a university as a future job-seeking student.

Specifically without SSI, many who are unable to pursue a degree would end up homeless and hungry, becoming a greater burden on society. In my opinion, it's unfortunate that you have to have a disability in order to qualify for this safety-net program; as I know several people who turned to less favorable means of providing for themselves, because they were rock-bottom and didn't qualify for any programs.

So, yeah, the VA program, and many other programs in the US are great examples of both some of the harms, but also the significant positive benefits that socialist policies can have for a population. Indeed, the greatest harms done by socialist programs in the US seem to be caused by their limitations and inability to properly serve enough people. Providing a everyone access to a solid safety net would do wonders for us as a society and for our economy.

TL;DR The fediverse represents a socialist philosophy in that these servers are not all administered by a centralized authority, but by the individuals who put forth the labor to bring them into existence.

Socialism doesn't necessarily have a strict definition. There are some who assert such definitions, but take the work of Karl Marx, he wrote a criticism of capitalism in an analytical fashion. There's Marx-influenced socialism, but to say "Marxism" is a little misleading, because it's not like he proposed an exact plan for how to run an economy and government, rather he discussed the problems with how we assign value to labor.

In general, and in my opinion, socialism as a broader philosophy is the idea that society should be constructed in such a way that it behaves in the interest of the people. In other-words, the goal is to design functional social systems that can ensure equal rights to a high quality of life, while also incentivizing and rewarding participation(I know many suggest that modern capitalism does this, but it doesn't).

So, in the case of social media and the fediverse, these federated networks are comparable to social systems that are operated by the public, governed by the public, and funded by the public. Therefore, see TL;DR.

Not entirely true, I sort of jest when I make hyperbolic statements about socialism being the anti-CEO. I personally believe in mixed economies that are well regulated. I know a lot of people dismiss the successes in Norway and neighboring countries on ideas of "cultural/racial homogeneity" among other things, but they do quite well with mixed economies.

In mixed economies, you have both the right and incentive to start a small to medium sized business; and if you become too big and ubiquitous, the government can step-in to help govern your company.

It's not a perfect solution (I'm not sure if that exists), but I think it's one of the best models we have--and a lot of the governing principles are derived from socialist criticisms of unregulated capitalism. Especially in the US I think we'd benefit from this sort of economic structure; but in-order for that to happen in a meaningful and positive way for the public, we will need electoral reform.

Edited: ¶1 "with a mixed economies" to "with mixed economies".