this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Technology

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I am so happy to see people coming together and moving away from commercial platforms. It feels silly to say it, but it seems like it is a step in the right direction. It is technological and social progress. Decentralization is a really fantastic tool and it seems to be a system that cannot be controlled internally or externally. Mastodon has been great, and I expect Lemmy to be even better.

To anyone reading, if you have any extra cash, look into making a small donation to your instance. The people running it are not just putting in time, they are likely paying hundreds a month to rent server space.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 years ago (5 children)

Money is going to be the deciding factor in the long-term health of the entire Fediverse. More users on each instance means more costs -- and to some extent, even users not on that instance will contribute to cost. That money has to come from somewhere, and eventually, if the Fediverse is going to scale up to even a sizable portion of what we're moving away from, we need real, consistent money involved. It doesn't have to be full VC corpo junk, but eventually, some instances are going to need a team.

I want this stuff to work great, but expecting the people running it to pay the cost forever isn't sustainable.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

would it be a good idea to have comment/post rewards like gold/silver etc. where the proceeds go to help fund instances?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (3 children)

So... it could work. But that's not going to be consistent, and the federated nature of things like Lemmy makes for some weird structures. Can you give rewards across instances? What if one instance has "gold" at $1, but another has it at $0.50?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

People are usually more willing to spend some money on community projects such as an instance they like. This could be a financially viable way to fund online platforms like Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Donations are not consistent, that's the big trouble. Especially after a big exodus, people may move, and they may donate for a while, but those donations will typically drop off eventually, even if they keep using it.

You're right that people are usually more willing to spend on community projects, and that's largely true - but watching open-source software as long as I have, I know that donations rarely cover things in the long-term, and most of the projects that are funded well enough to have a team behind them are actually funded by corporations. Heck, even getting one person able to run an instance as a full time gig is going to be difficult without it turning corporate.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Well said 👏👏

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This is great, many more subreddits should do something like this. But in the end, it’s us, the end users, who should do the actual protesting since it’s us who have the power to change things. I’ve decided not to give them any kind of traffic from now on. Me, by myself, won’t make much impact but if more of us did the same they’d be force to change their strategy.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

Subreddits doing this will have a much bigger impact than end users, because large masses of people will never do anything inconvenient on their own. This is the reason why capitalism doesn't self-regulate for better environmental standards, for an example. The whole personal carbon footprint thing was invented by an oil company to shame individuals so we can blame eachother for our consumption instead of regulating energy companies. Nothing changes if we rely on everyone to do the right thing without any external motivations (be it environmental regulations or closing subreddits).

[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I like the "indefinite" part. Let it stay dark forever and have people make iphone subs in the lemmyverse. The Reddit is dead, long live the Lemmy!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Anything short of indefinite is just a virtue signal, imo.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 years ago (3 children)

It's a shame promoting Lemmy isn't part of the blackout

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 years ago (6 children)

It's been attempted in various spots, but either reddit itself removes the mentions or edits them out

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yeah the fact that they actually banned the kbinmigration subreddit is absolutely WILD to me. I made a comment on a post a couple of weeks ago now about how this wouldn't change anything, and a few people would leave like the last time they did something that made people upset, but most people would stay. After the ama and everything last week though I've completely changed my mind, I was wrong.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

You weren't wrong. Reddit has over 400 million monthly users. A tiny percentage of that will move to Lemmy. Less than 1% this year is my guess.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

They delete comments referencing lemmy

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

True that. Kinda weird actually to go dark but not providing alternative avenue.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I've been promoting Lemmy for the past few days and have gotten my comments removed and downvoted by people claiming that Lemmy was a far left recruiting ground for domestic terrorism lmao

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

I know, right?

I'm an INTERNATIONAL terrorist, thank you very much.

I'm not about to destroy my OWN country... my government at least does THAT for me!

😄

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 years ago (16 children)

The loss of the forum like help threads will probably be the most impactful thing. We can build communities elsewhere, but the 8 years old post about a problem only you and the OP is having is super valuable.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I'd like to add a comment here just to add some visibility:

If you have an uncapped/unlimited internet connection, you should seriously consider running the Archive Team Warrior

They're heavily involved in scraping and archiving data from all over the internet (and, recently, most/all of Reddit) so that it's preserved, regardless of what happens to the underlying platform.

I run it on my home server in docker, but they have a lot of options for doing so and it basically requires just running it, and then forgetting it exists.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

It can also be ran as an appliance in a virtual machine like VirtualBox!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Awesome, going to set this up later at home today!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

There was talk of someone populating a Lemmy instance with reddit data.

There is a lot of reddit data on a torrent somewhere aparrently.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

That's the thing that bothered me the most about deleting my account. I had multiple people say thanks for posting solutions and problems with solutions I had, even years later. Not specific to iphone but in general.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Good thing I've never been of any use to anyone then :)

... :'(

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

I feel that. I posted about a Plex problem 2 years ago and the subsequent solution I worked out. Every once in a while I still get someone replying to that and thanking me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Not only that. But if Reddit really suffers badly from this it might also have an impact on small communities. It's really simple to set up a community on any topic on there. And it's currently mainstream enough that you can get people on-boarded pretty quickly.

Larger communities may find a new home elsewhere. But for smaller ones that feels much more difficult.

Thanks to last week's fiasco I discovered the fediverse and hopefully others too. I just hope it's intuitive enough that people don't get scared away.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago

I'm glad some subreddits are going dark for good, not only will this actually hurt reddit as a company but also it will lead to some people switching to alternatives like lemmy which is always a good thing.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

The Reddit community from which
[email protected] is an offshoot from does this.

They went dark indefinitely (until (or if) the API changes are cancelled/undone.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago

Lol I can’t wait till this is national news, right before they go for their IPO.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

I’m worried that all the new large communities are hosted at a single instance, lemmy.ml

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