Kichae

Yes, exactly.

He’s going to be playing wack-a-mole against Nazis while also trying to live up to expectations of the freeze peach crowd, and be left constantly scratching his head as to why the game just keeps on going.

My suspicion – and this is coming out of my behind – is that rather than being proactive about these things, they’re setting themselves up to learn a hard lesson about known troll tactics. They’re trying to be all free-speechy and user-decisiony, but spaces like TD just draw people who will not ever actually follow the server rules.

So, they’ll keep dancing over this line, giving these communities the benefit of the doubt, only to discover time and again that they don’t care about their rules, and they’ll have to be banned.

Yes, Calckey is to Mastodon as kbin is to Lemmy. Different pieces of website software that do similar things and cross-communicate.

Calckey is less popular, but is developing at a faster rate, and is much more open to community feedback.

Check out a Calckey instance (I think it’s a significantly better UX compared to Mastodon, and they federate) and their PWA. It’s pretty good. But there’s a list of native apps for it here: https://calckey.org/apps/

Not to mention believing there’s anything “left wing” about Reddit.

There’s free speech, i.e. the government cannot persecute you for what you say, and then there “free speech”, i.e. people expecting others to platform speech they find repulsive.

The alt-facts folks aren’t being silenced. They’re free to keep on talking. No one is obligated to host them and their words, however.

The John Oliver stuff is happening on Reddit, though. That’s where the attention is, that’s where his face is being plastered everywhere. It really has nothing to do with anything here.

It’s all people who don’t want to be here, sending the message that they don’t want over there to change.

Plus he’s probably heard of Reddit, but not Lemmy, kbin, or the Fediverse. And he has no dog in

Ah. I got woooshed!

IQ probably has little to do with it. It’s socialization and learned expectation that are acting as a filter currently.

The community size thing is going to be interesting as the space grows. The fact that there are functionally infinite name spaces means that “politics” doesn’t just get to become the default politics discussion space for everyone wandering into the place. Lemmy.ca/c/politics can be a very different place than Lemmy.ml/c/politics, which will be very different from lemmy.world/c/politics, which will be very different again from beehaw.org/c/politics.

And you can suppose that everyone will just use the biggest one by default, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. The biggest subreddit got that way predominantly because of their name, and there’s a good chance that people’ll see their local one first, not the biggest. Or that they’ll see multiple of them, and end up engaging with multiple communities before they realize what’s going on and settle on the one that suits them best.

There will always be a biggest, but there can be a larger number of smaller, lively communities because they don’t need to take on names like “r/truepolitics” or “r/onguardforthee” (which is a so very discoverable and intuitive r/Canada alternative).

We’ll have to see how the dynamics play out over time.

Media hosting is the biggest expense, and there are services that make that significantly cheaper through sharing and deduplication.

A major instance can probably get by on a few hundred dollars a month. If it has, say, 100k active users, and 1% of them donate $5 a month, then not only is there enough to cover infrastructure expenses, but they can also put some aside in a rainy day fund, use it to expand hosting to other platforms (lemmy.world is made possible, at least initially, by donations to mastodon.world), or even pay instance-level mods.

Mstdn.social, a very busy Mastodon site, has 200k users and runs on a 32 core VPS with 128GB of RAM. Comparable unmanaged VPS packages go for around $300/month. After that, it’s all media storage.

Sounds like a good entry for the issues tracker!

If you added alt-text, it doesn’t seem to be working. At least not for me.

Support your admins, if you can. But yes, bouncing around will happen. Hopefully with added development support coming from an expanded userbase, account migration can be implemented on both Lemmy and kbin and people can move around with relative ease, as the need or desire strike.

Reddit isn’t going to disappear, but that doesn’t mean it won’t die. Going public will kill Reddit. The parent company isn’t profitable, and the product isn’t profitable, and public investors will only tolerate that if growth suggests future gains.

Those future gains will be had by strangling Reddit and twisting its corpse into something much less useful, interesting, and fun.

Reddit’s animated corpse will carry on for years, but that IPO will be a poisoned pill for what we know and recognize as Reddit.

Communities can’t be shut down, but they can be shut out. This is also just true in life in general.

If The_Donald were to set up shop on Lemmy.ml, they could ban the instance and the members, but they could just turn around and join another instance.

So, what do you do then? Site admins can ban the remote instance, and they can put pressure on the hosting site admins by threatening to defederate.

Let’s say the new hosting site’s admin gives into defederation pressure and also bans the instance and its members. We’ll, then those people can set up their own server. Now, the admin won ban them.

But none of the major servers will federated with them. They’ll be alone on their low population fashy instance (or not so low population - Truth Social is suppsoey the biggest Mastodon instance), effectively quarantined.

That’s the best anyone can do. That’s true with or without Lemmy.

Most closed source, profit driven projects fail or end eventually too. Customers find other things to buy. Employees look for other lines of work.

Incentivizing behaviour don’t usually lead to motivated people, just obligated ones.

There could be several reasons for this, depending on what exactly you mean.

When the first person on an instance to subscribe to a remote community does so, the local mirror of that community starts receiving posts and comments from the original. But older posts and comments are not retrieved. You’re only getting stuff going forward.

So, if you’re talking about an instance that is much younger than Lemmy.ml, it’ll have only a small fraction of the backlog.

On the other hand, if what you’re seeing is that new comments and posts aren’t reliably showing up, we’ll, that’s likely an issue of the server hosting the community being absolutely fucking destroyed by traffic right now.

Not an expert, but what I’ve pieced together over the past year:

ActivityPub platforms work on a subscribe-and-wait model, similar to a magazine or newspaper subscription. You find an ‘actor’ on another server you want to receive content from and you follow them. This sends a signal to your server that you want to see that actor’s posts in your streams, and if your server is not currently receiving content from that actor, then it should request that the actor’s host server send any posts they publish along. Your local server then stores and hosts those posts locally, as if they had originated from the server (but with pointers back to the original host, so that replies can be forwarded back to the original poster).

These actors can be other users, or they can be groups (which is what Lemmy communities are), which work by receiving posts addressed to them and then forwarding them along to subscribers.

Your local server infrastructure may allow you to subscribe to users, or to groups, or to both. And they may play host to users, or to groups, or to both. Lemmy hosts both users and groups, but only allows users to subscribe to groups. Friendica and /kbin host both users and groups, and allow users to subscribe to both. Mastodon hosts only users, but allows users to subscribe to both users and groups. And Guppe and Chirp host only groups.

Generally speaking, text is cheap to transmit and store. It’s images and video that could be a real issue.

But ultimately, content on small instances may end up being somewhat ephemeral. Developers and admins may want to look into ways to earmark significant posts so that they don’t end up in the dustbin, but 90%+ of what gets posted to social media isn’t actually worth saving long term anyway.