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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • rglullis@communick.newstoFedigrow@lemm.eeThinking of moving a community I have.
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    2 days ago

    you just take out the trash

    I don’t know what it is, maybe it’s some form of ikea effect, where people think that the act of filling a form, adding an icon and a description makes them immediately attached to something that (initially) amounts to a record field in a database.

    I’ve lost count of how many people I asked “Hey, I saw you are the mod of <mostly inactive community on large instance>, I am running <slightly active/mostly inactive community on topic-specific instance>. How about we join forces?” And almost invariably they act like I am asking them to give me their firstborn.







    • Sign up to Fediverser
    • Search for communities for your interests.
    • The community should be associated with a subreddit. If it’s not, you can make a suggestion for the change.
    • Apply to become a Community Ambassador. I’ll approve it. Once you are approved, you will be able to do the following:
      • See the posts from the subreddit that is associated to the community.
      • Send DMs to people on Reddit, inviting them to join Lemmy and your community
      • Add other sources of contents (RSS feeds)

    There were more things that I had planned, such as the ability to do one-click repost of interesting links, but I didn’t get to it because that would mean effectively that I would have to turn the fediverser site into a an alternative Lemmy frontend.



  • She touches on the aspect of monetization and claims that “you could save money by being on the Fediverse”.

    Yes, in theory it is possible. In practice this is something that only is available for the already-famous journalists who have enough pull to move their audience from Substack to their own property.

    For everyone else, the Fediverse is (a) too small and (b) too “anti-money” to encourage professionals to even try making a living here. They stay on Substack for the same reason that video creators stay on YouTube: it’s a horrible master, but at least it lets them pay their bills.



  • Quite on the contrary, if anyone seriously tried that it would fail quickly and just result in burned investments

    What do you think that Automattic, Flipboard and Ghost are doing? Do you think they are paying people to develop integrations with AP because they are really nice people and have zero intentions of profiting from their investments?

    Look, I better leave this conversation. I should have learned by now that there is no point in arguing with ideologues.


  • would be a very poor substitute most likely

    • phanpy is already doing it for Mastodon, and there are plenty of people satisfied with it.
    • You have no idea how far one can go by getting a generic training model and fine-tuning on the device
    • we don’t need to have something a perfect replacement. We just need “good enough”.
    • even if it is not perfect, it is better than the nothing that reactionary “no algorithm in the Fediverse!” crowd is bringing to the table.

    That is just not helpful at all, because it destroys the very foundation of what the Fediverse tries to achieve.

    Says who? You and the gatekeepers who’d rather have everyone stuck in the past, just to preserve some technical/ideological purity?


  • Yes, they do like the personalized algorithmic feed, and that is inseperable from the surveillance part.

    There is absolutely nothing stopping the personalization algorithms to run on-device or delegated to a separate service from the video feed.

    they certainly don’t want to pay for it either.

    It doesn’t have to be a “donation/public funding” vs “ads/surveillance capitalism” dichotomy. I bet we can find alternative models of governance and funding, provided we get to a place Fediverse is relevant enough to attract the attention of some small business, media channels, institutions, etc.


  • There is no point in trying to make the Fediverse a copy of the corporate social media to appeal to users that see no reason to switch.

    Again, this is just a lazy cop-out and a perfect display of the hubris here that is so off-putting.

    You make it sound that the people using Instagram or TikTok are there because they like the Surveillance Capitalism, or getting bombard by ads, or they are all sucking up to Zuckerberg. Have you ever considered that maybe people are still there because they actually like some of the features they use in the products and they can’t find it here?


  • “Millions of people”, let’s round it up to 10 million, ok?

    Instagram reports 2 billion active users. TikTok reports 1.5 billion, Facebook reports 3 billion. So, the Fediverse as a whole gets maybe to reach 0.6% of the major networks.

    Do you want compare only with the Threadiverse with Reddit? Let’s be again be generous here and round it up to 60k MAU. Reddit is reporting around 75 million MAU. So, even if we consider that Reddit is lying like crazy and that 2/3 of the users on Reddit are fake, Reddit is ~400 times larger.

    This is cockroach levels of usage.

    Yes, the Fediverse will survive. But it doesn’t mean that it ever was relevant.



  • I disagree about “the primary service” of a minority provider. The minority provider can do a lot more than just “send” emails to the larger share, and I think they can be instrumental for us to bring a tool from the intolerant minorities to the mainstream.

    I also disagree about the idea of “managed opposition”. “Managed opposition” is what Mozilla does to Google with Firefox. They are paid by Google to be kept around. I am not saying that we should take the Fediverse and seek funding from Threads, or for us to depend on Facebook.

    Finally, I have serious doubts that this “prefigurative infrastructure building” is effective. To me it seems like just a collective of aimless rebels who want to keep this universe secluded from everyone else, but it’s just too afraid to say it out loud.

    Anyway, thanks for the chat. I understand I won’t be able to change your mind, but to go back to the original topic: I just wish that next time we don’t see someone as “toxic” just because they were not willing to put up with all these silly rules and rituals that everyone seems to follow without questioning.


  • these companies are at the whim of the large oligopolies

    Why? We are talking about FOSS and services based on FOSS, here. Do you think that Google would be able to successfully shut down small email providers without repercussions?

    pose absolutely no threat to them

    Why is that relevant? I do not particularly care about eliminating the large corporations, at least not from the start. I’d be more than happy if we could grow this ecosystem here to become a sizable share of the overall market.

    I’d rather work towards a world where Facebook has “only” 70% of the market to themselves and the rest of us foment a healthy economy sustaining the other 30%, than to keep this delusional idea that a scrappy bunch of nerds are going to be able to take Lemmy/Mastodon/PixelFed/Matrix/XMPP to the mainstream by wishful thinking and “community” alone.