Pekka

The article makes some good points, cooperation can easily get greedy when their platform gets too large. It does feel like it tries to connect FOSS to privacy, though, and that's a bit more controversial, especially when it comes to the Fediverse. For a platform like Lemmy the most important thing is to share the post that you published, there is limited development time, security is hard, and when things go wrong it is hard to point at someone.

For example, sending private messages often leads to these private messages being readable by the admins of the instance. In the same way, instance admins can also see the email address that you provided. So we just have to trust the instance admin to be capable enough to protect our data and not leak it out on the internet.

Of course, these issues also exist in companies that want to push out new features to attract users instead of spending time to test if everything is secure. It simply is a difficult point for both FOSS and commercial software, and we need to hold both FOSS and commercial parties responsible for respecting our privacy. At least with FOSS, we can switch to a fork if a maintainer does not do their job well.

I actually really like being this early on the platform, last time that happened was Google+ and that went nowhere. But this time it feels like you can actually contribute to the platform. This can be done by posting interesting things, just chatting in the communities you like, and can even help with the development of Lemmy if you have the skills.

I hope this will be the first Open Source project that I can help, I always wanted to contribute to open source, but that never went further than publishing my own projects (that were way too specific to be useful to anyone else) under an open source licence.

There are pull requests for a sort of super communities, that are basically a view over multiple communities. That would be the only way to merge communities, I think. I don't see any options on my current 0.17.3 version of Lemmy to move posts from a community to another community, so if you would want to delete a community, all posts will just end up being linked to a deleted community.

The law that requires phones to use USB-C, does not say it will last forever. In fact, the update to USB-C proves that they look for new technologies and update the law once such a thing is needed. Maybe now people have to buy new chargers, but in the long term, keeping chargers the same will reduce e-waste as people can use USB-C to charge many devices. You can charge your MacBook and smartphone with the same charger because of USB-C and the USB power delivery specification.

But the Fair Share part is a bit weird, consumers already pay for the network. But often they don't pay for the amount of data that they use. It would make more sense to just charge users again based on their network usage, but I understand that that would be highly unpopular. In the end, someone has to pay for all the traffic though.

From what I understood from the Beehaw situation, other instances would have a snapshot of those post, but they would no longer receive any new reactions or votes, not even from other instances that they are still federated with (the host instance is the instance that should provide all other instances with new comments and votes). People would still be able to add comments, but those would not be shared with other instances.

Some google searches already give me Lemmy posts, so it seems to work. I think indexing Lemmy posts takes more time, as I couldn't find my 'blog article' about hosting Lemmy on a Raspberry Pi or the community where it was posted yet trough Google yet. But I was able to find older communities on Feddit.nl, So most of the posts probably can't be found yet, as they simply are too new.

Although Lemmy is free and open source, the main power is the federation. The most valuable thing that Lemmy has, are its users and the content (this is the same for Reddit). And because of the federation every instance in the Lemmy network has these assets.

Let's say one instance would get massive, and would stop federating and start charging for API access. If that happened, we would be in the same situation as now with Reddit. Yea, it would e a lot easier to set up your own instance, but you would still need to convince all these people to give up that main instance. So I'm really happy that federation basically would mean that all other instances could cut that massive instance out and still have all the data.

I got similar issues when playing around with it yesterday evening. For some reason, the client kept reporting sorting options as integers, while the back-end just expected 'New'.

You can assign others as mod or ask someone else to make the community. But when you make a community, Lemmy automatically makes you the moderator of the community. It is not weird to ask others to help modding a community after you set it up initially, not everyone has the time to moderate.

That's a good start. It starts small, but it can go fast. For now, it is often quite important that people make new posts. I see that a lot of people are very comfortable to comment, but smaller communities hardly get any new posts.

But then once you start helping with that, before you know, you write a whole blogpost.

Good luck @[email protected] It is good to see the community growing!

Longer chains have a lot more weight here, I think. But I heard more complaints about post sorting not working well. So it could be a good idea to check what is really happening and see if and how this could be improved.