Could all of you go outside for a little bit, touch grass, smile at a stranger?

Sometimes I get angry at myself for wasting my time in pointless discussions, but this is next-level wankery. If you know that hexbear is a pig hut, don’t come here to complain that you are full of mud and pig shit in your face.

Reported as off-topic.

Well, surely, but this constraint is there by design. The point of these users is not to attract users, but to have thematic communities that can be followed by users elsewhere on the Fediverse.

This is not an accurate representation of what I’ve been defending:

users should pay 30$ a year to get access to professionally-managed instances

“Should” is not the right verb, and you are omitting the context. What I have been saying for the past two years already is that if people on the Fediverse don’t realize that there are real costs to develop the software and operate the servers, it will never be able to grow, and if you doubt that just see how growth has completely stalled in relation to better funded alternatives like Threads, Bluesky and even Farcaster.

This is not about paying for my servers. It can be about running your own, from home. It can be about getting together with your real life friends and sharing a server. It can be about convincing the IT department of your company to set up a server for their social media.

What I am saying, simply put, is “you’ll get what you pay for”. I’m saying that those that want the Fediverse to grow need to make significant investment on it. Your idea of “material support” is to “pay for the cost of running the servers”, and this is just taking all the work from the developers, instance admins and moderators for granted.

(And no, “I also spend time bringing content and participating, so it should be counted” is not true, because this is just standard usage of the application being developed)

we should centralize content based on a few of those professionally-managed instance

Again, not true. The topic-specific instances are not meant to be a source of revenue for Communick. I never said that I was planning to charge access to those instances, and I never said anything about pushing them to some corporate system.

based on the thread from 4 days ago, no admins has jumped in and offered to help

@[email protected] has already expressed support of the idea and @[email protected] is at least considering it.

The thread was not meant to get input from the admins. The thread was meant to gauge interest from the communities about using it.

There is also issues of “opinion as fact”.

the cost of these instances is around 6500€ per year setting up an infrastructure that costs 1700 € per year on domain names alone is unreasonable

First, I don’t know where you got the 6500€ number. I said 1700€ for the domains + 2400€ (200€/month) for the servers. My operating costs are ~4000€/year. 4000€ per year for 18 instances amounts to less than 20€/month/instance.

Second, on the occasion that these instances became a more integral part of the Fediverse, it would not be difficult to raise enough money to keep them running. For comparison, the folks from LW are raising ~950€/month on patreon alone and if you go by the rule of thumb that ~2% of users contribute to their instances, the ~360€/month needed for these servers could be raised by less than 20k active users that decided to give 1€/month.

Thirdly, domains like nba.space and nfl.community are valuable. They can help with SEO, they provide legitimacy and (should the community agree) they could be one of the first places to try alternative monetization methods to fund the development of all the Fediverse.

Lastly - and without offense the fact that I have to explain this to you is a strong indicator that you are either very young or financially illiterate - you are hung up on the nominal prices, but all these costs are business expenses. They are sort of a sunk cost already and/or they can be used to deduct from my tax bill.

All in all, this whole part of your argument can be summarized as “I think it is expensive, and I wouldn’t pay for that, so I don’t think others would/should be interested in it”. Your opinion is, just, you know, your opinion, man…

having one small team per instance instead of a centralized consortium managing all of these instances seems healthier. The local team manages their instances, they make it grow organically, people see that the instance is reliable, they start trusting it and establish communities on it.

How has that worked out for the people on kbin, or feddit.de, or FMHY?

The question here is not about “small teams” vs “centralized groups”. I think the crux of the matter is:

• How much do we really want the Fediverse to grow and become a mainstream social media platform?
• If we want it to grow, where are we going to get resources to support its development?
• If we really want it to grow, how fast do we want it grow? If it’s too slow it risks becoming irrelevant (see Bluesky), too fast and it risks becoming a chaos that is not recognizable by the original members (see web3 being taken by get-rich-quick scammers)

It certainly is one of the factors.

We missed a lot of opportunities during Rexxit because Redditors did not know where to go and could not easily find the communities they were interested on, except for the very popular ones.

Then we had the period where people were saying “oh, just send everyone to LW”, which did not really help in terms of discovery and basically painted a target on their backs, not to mention that it caused such a problematic dynamic in the federation: given it is the instance with the most people and the most communities, it generates a lot of activities and makes it almost impossible for instances that are away from Europe to keep up.

So, the Lemmy network is a bit capped at the current size. It will only be able to grow 2x if the majority of users end up on LW, and the more users on LW, the bigger the problem gets.

Having instances focused exclusively on being the home of communities would remove the bottleneck and reduce the load on any single instance. It would remove the “which instance to join” problem and it would bring a more clear migration path.

they do not want to take on the additional tasks of modding or administrating your instance and you find their reasons unacceptable so you make this comparison

This is not what I’ve asked. All I’ve asked was to look into the content that he was already interested in posting (e.g, tv shows and football) and to do in the communities from the topic-specific instances instead of the bigger “user” instances, and every time there was some random objection to avoid doing it.

• You are running these alone, what if something happens to you? I have a friend who worked with me before and has the ability to take over my operations in case something happens to me.
• This is not enough. He is not involved now Ok, so let me put these instances in some type of collective with the admins. I don’t mind to continue operating them and covering the operational costs, all I would like is to have some commitment from any type of current admin that can assuage your concerns.
• Your domains are too expensive, admins will not be interested in paying for this. I am not asking the eventual co-owners to pay for anything.

The excuses are getting more and more ridiculous. It actually got to the point where the reason to avoid joining the football instance is because of the domain name having “soccer” instead of “football”, but at the same time saying “please don’t buy a football domain”.

The funny thing is, I wouldn’t mind at all if he came out and said “no, I don’t want to help you”, even if there was no particular reason for it. The unbearably annoying thing was this concern trolling, this constant “Oh, I don’t mind helping, but only after X”.

I am offering the instances to the wider community, precisely so that they are not “mine”.

The easiest way to get me to quit the “self promotion” is quite simple: step up and start putting actual skin in the game to build the infrastructure needed to support more people.

I had written a longer response, but I realized that it is pointless to continue there or any discussion with you. Every time I address any of your concerns you came up with a new obstacle. Whenever you were asked to make any form of effort, you refused. This is not the behavior of someone who is serious about coordinating efforts.

It feels immature, like a college student who still depends on their parent’s allowance but wants to cosplay as an independent adult.

Not that surprising, considering active users around here (like you) refuse to contribute to it.

For entertainment: https://metacritics.zone

For sports: https://athletic.center

Both of these instances (and many others) are part of the network of topic-specific instances that I’ve created and now I’m looking to find a way to share with other admins.

The only problem at the moment is that I’m the only with access to these instances, but if you want to create new communities I can give you an account on them.

benefit your administrative influence from your instances

They are not going to be “my” instances.

acknowledging any objective perspectives.

Oh, I thought it was pretty clear: my objective with these instances have been to build the infrastructure necessary to get people out of Reddit. I want to gain from the growth of the network, where I expect to profit from getting customers on my hosting business.

I don’t need/want to make money out of these instances, I am just commoditizing the complements.

• Your key is your identity. If it’s lost or stolen, you can not revoke it. That alone will make it virtually impossible to be used as an official application protocol for any organization.

• Usability is even worse than anything on ActivityPub

• Moderation is entirely punted to the end user.

• (not technical, but relevant) it is completely dominated by Bitcoin maxis

A type of federation where there is no “home” for a community any more.

This is not federation anymore, but an entirely different architecture. Nostr works like this, but it also has its flaws.

Dear Lord, I had no idea one could be so lost and still be so confident when making an argument.

I am not trying to be mean, it’s just that you are arguing against things that are completely made up.

So instead of one admin being able to take it all down we have multiple

Shared ownership is a policy to prevent single-points-of-failure. Every large-ish instance has multiple admins. This is even a requirement in the Mastodon Covenant: your instance is only listed on the joinmastodon site if the instance has at least two people who can independently access the admin panel.

Could go and notarize shared ownership of a bare metal server I suppose?

You don’t need any of that. As long as the collective has control over the domains and that backups are created and available for everyone, admins could simply move the instance to a new place with a new deployment and a DNS change.

It does not mean that every admin needs to have direct access to the server, and it does not mean that the server will go down if one of them goes rogue. Every minimally competent organization has security processes in place to avoid that.

But we have multiple admins, so these instances would be uniquely able to process very large numbers of users on account of having more than one admin?

I can’t even imagine how you go to this non-sequitur. The idea of having multiple admins is only to ensure that these instances are not under control of a single individual and would not be represent a systemic risk to the overall Fediverse.

If you want communities to be resistant to server removal

Another non-sequitur.

So that even if the original instance is gone, everyone keeps interacting with their local federated community-copy

How is that working out for the communities on feddit.de, and the many other instances that disappeared in the last year? Did you notice they are gone?

In particular because that still doesn’t solve the problem because now you got people able to either moderate each others copy

Another non-sequitur. Are you sure you have a clear understanding of how federation works?

From your response, it seems that you did not read the blog post. The instances are still going to be connected to the Fediverse, the idea is just to keep user registration closed. Users from other instances will continue to be able to follow and interact with it.

Feel free to register a football domain. I will host it for you, free of charge.

I just think that letting people making accounts tied to their favorite topics would get more people interested in joining them.

Could be, but I guess we now just arguing opinions. And given that I am personally hold the opposite view and I don’t want to be be identified by my interests, I am not going to push for something that I fundamentally disagree with.

Please, spare me from the cheap rhetoric.

I’ve been for over an year offering alternatives, attempting to bring actionable proposals to the table, putting resources on the line (go take a look at the matrix room and you may find me telling people that I registered selfhosted.forum and I wanted to give it for free to the /r/selfhosted mods) and every time there is any type of push for concrete effort, I am met with apathy at best and suspicion at worst.

Everyone keeps crying about Zuckerberg/Threads/Venture Capitalists/Spez, but when push comes to shove no one wants to mobilize and put up a proper fight.

It’s tiring and frustrating.

Sorry, I can not let go of this. I don’t know if you realized that the whole reason that I am doing this is because you kept pushing this idea that you’d be more than willing to contribute to different instances and that the only thing that is stopping you is that you’d be worried about me being the only person.

Even with me telling you that I have other people to take over my operations, you were doubting me.

Now that I am actually going forward and offering to get more people onboard, while asking for NOTHING in return, you are putting this bullshit, pretending to be worried about price of domains.

What you are doing is just Concern Trolling, and I am frankly tired of this. You have put no Skin in the Game, yet you continue to find ways to rationalize your senseless idea that this is going to grow magically without getting people to put significant resources at stake.

There are plenty of ways where people can enter into an equity agreement without having to pay directly with money.

can take over should something happen to you

Are you trying to get rid of me? Then why are you arguing as if (a) something bad might happen to me or (b) I am somehow unable/unfit to manage this?

No matter what I do/offer/propose, you will always try to find an excuse to rationalize your unwillingness to contribute to what I am doing, like I’m failing some type of BS purity test.

Which part of “I am not asking for financial support” is not clear from the blog post?