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.
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.
would it be a good idea to have comment/post rewards like gold/silver etc. where the proceeds go to help fund instances?
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?
ooo good point. i knew someone smarter than me would elucidate this. danke.
Maybe you have to buy them from the instance you’re using them on?
That starts running into a few issues. It’s high friction (“You mean I have to enter card details every time I want to do this on someone from a new instance?”) and it has some serious risk of disproportionate impacts.
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.
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.
Yeah, consistency is a problem. Perhaps we should implement some sort of Lemmy Coin solution that would allow people to show their appreciation to quality posts and support the instance at the same time.
Federation frustrates that, as well – for cross-instance posts, what’s the split? 50/50? What if one instance is charging $1 per coin, but another is $0.50 per coin, what price becomes paid? How will you even ensure that the split can occur reliably? Heck, how will you handle trying to do that transfer internationally?
I know I’m probably coming across as a downer, but without answering these questions, we don’t have a solution, we just have a patchwork of ideas that people worked on and implemented without every providing anything useful. I want this to succeed, desperately. I’m tired of corporate interests ruining everything – but we can’t succeed at this without figuring out these long-term issues.
Hmm… Those are valid points.
I can’t come up with anything brilliant, so I’ll just give you my mediocre idea instead. Let’s say there’s an “award foundation“ where you can buy “Lemmy gold” and other awards for a fixed piece. When you find a post worthy of the award, the value is spread among everyone involved. One third to your instance, one third to the instance of the recipient of the award and one third to the instance where the conversion was had.
They could add the sites asbracve creators and get some revenue from that.Its depends on the number of users but anything helps
Unfortunately, the way federation works means that a 100 user instance that never grows past that can still see cost increases from the ecosystem growing. The number of network effects involved in all of this makes planning for meaningful sustainability a lot more difficult.
Your right. I overlooked the network itself. Thanks for the added perspective 👍
Well said 👏👏
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.
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).
That’s not to say you shouldn’t also look at your own actions - personally I deleted Apollo on my phone and blocked the reddit domains on my work laptop and home network. But big players (I.e big subreddits) need to be part of the change.
This is a great video on the carbon footprint campaign: https://youtu.be/1J9LOqiXdpE
It’s a shame promoting Lemmy isn’t part of the blackout
It’s been attempted in various spots, but either reddit itself removes the mentions or edits them out
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.
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.
That’s a huge number to move to Lemmy, but to reddit it probably represents nothing much.
Is that really something that’s been happening?
deleted by creator
https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-edit-comments
He’s done this type of thing in the past, and nothing about his current state of behavior makes me think he’s unwilling to do so again.
My comment just got downvoted, but it’s still there (and has reactions of other migratees to lemmy, so not invisible).
Yikes
They delete comments referencing lemmy
True that. Kinda weird actually to go dark but not providing alternative avenue.
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
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!
😄
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!
Anything short of indefinite is just a virtue signal, imo.
Agreed
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.
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.
It can also be ran as an appliance in a virtual machine like VirtualBox!
Awesome, going to set this up later at home today!
First I’ve heard of it, so looks like I’ll happily be donating bandwidth tonight!
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.
Good thing I’ve never been of any use to anyone then :)
… :'(
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.
There was talk of someone populating a Lemmy instance with reddit data.
There is a lot of reddit data on a torrent somewhere aparrently.
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.
But for smaller ones that feels much more difficult.
I guess that’s kind of the beauty of federation here. If somebody is brought in for other stuff, they’ll likely see when their hobby/niche/etc community becomes a thing because surely somebody else will subscribe to something on that server
That’s a problem with every non-physical storage of data/knowledge - it’s ephemeral and can disappear anytime
From time to time I do think about the Carrington Event and wonder what would happen if something like that happened in today’s time. Because of exactly the reason of how reliant we are on electronical data.
How resilient is our infrastructure really? Especially satellites used for communication. I assume that most critical cold-storage is mostly fine. But all the small personal electronic devices will probably be toast.
Well, not only did this very nearly happen (a comparable size emission missed us by something like 12 hours), we have a pretty good idea what would happen.
Fires. Fires everywhere. Very little of our infrastructure is shielded, so basically everything would go offline… But that almost pales in comparison to the sheer number of fires started simultaneously
We do have hardened installations and a system to give a short warning to places in a position to unplug and protect certain equipment, but that doesn’t matter much in the short term because everything is on fire, and the air is filled with the toxic petrochemical gases we’ve been convinced to build everything out of.
Whoever survives the early days would theoretically be in a position to rebuild thanks to organizations like the US military - the knowledge of how is protected and there are plans to restore order. Most basic military hardware would be usable with maintenance (unlike most vehicles which rely on a bunch of microchips that don’t appreciate EMPs, and also fire)
Physical media can suffer the same fate, but not usually at the hands of a single entity.
My hope is that things like Chat GPT can now become that source. I can only assume all those historical posts were used as training data.
ChatGPT doesn’t understand the things it says. It shouldn’t be treated as a source of truth. It can be tripped up by nuance, or by statements which require an understanding of the concept of syntax. For example, if you ask it what is the longest 5-letter word, it will confidently give you an answer.
I wish more people understood this. So many people out there are taking what ChatGPT spits out as gospel when it’s actually very susceptible to manipulation and misinformation.
Here is what GPT 4 says:
Me: What is the longest 5-letter word?
ChatGPT:
The concept of the “longest” 5-letter word can be interpreted in two ways:
-
If “longest” refers to the physical length of the word (how it is pronounced), then it can vary based on different accents and languages. However, in English, five-letter words with a large number of syllables such as “queue” or “eerie” might be considered.
-
If “longest” refers to the word with the most definitions or uses, it’s hard to definitively state which 5-letter word that would be, but “round” and “sound” are examples of five-letter words with a large number of definitions and uses.
It’s also important to note that in English, all 5-letter words contain the same number of letters and would, therefore, have the same length if written in the same font and size.
words with a large number of syllables such as “queue” or “eerie” might be considered.
Lol
ChatGPT doesn’t know about variable width
-
Agreed. However, often when trying to fix something you have run out of options and just want new ideas. In my experience, LLMs are very good for that.
I made sure to delete all my Reddit data before deleting my account. Not getting anything from me.
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.
The Reddit community from which !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone is an offshoot from does this.
They went dark indefinitely (until (or if) the API changes are cancelled/undone.
Lol I can’t wait till this is national news, right before they go for their IPO.
!iphone@lemmy.ml is one offspring
I’m worried that all the new large communities are hosted at a single instance, lemmy.ml
Really 3 big players right now.
Lemmy.ml Lemmy.world Beehaw
Those 3 servers are like currently 70% of Lemmy traffic.
I wonder how feasible it would be to move a community to another instance without users noticing. It would be cool if there was a mechanism to silently update the link.
Sucks that the UI doesn’t auto-link that for you.
that Is currently an issue on the radar. Lets hope it gets picked up quickly
Bummer that they’re vetting all new subscribers for an iPhone community. Seems like an aggressive gatekeeping tactic for a benign topic.
I’ve heard in other lemmy communities that the vetting is mostly an attempt at an anti-spammer( and anti-troll) measure.
They are? I was able to subscribe immediately. Wonder if it’s just being slow now. A few things I’ve subscribed to the last day or so have been slow to show up on my subscription list and I assumed it was the influx from Rexxit bogging things down a bit.
The approved me pretty quickly, but I got “Subscribe Pending” when I clicked subscribe.
I honestly thought “subscribe pending” was some kind of automated thing. I’ve subscribed to a ton of communities and gotten plenty of pending statuses. If I wait about 5 to 10 seconds, they all change to “subscribed”.
is there a way to browse the newest subs in the instance?
There are two excellent lists I’ve seen. One is a community/sub browser made by someone on feddit.de, the other is a comprehensive list of reddit subs that have been duplicated in the Fediverse. (That one is surprisingly huge!). I didn’t make note of either of those, but surely someone will be along shortly with the links.
I suppose many there are also affected by the Apollo debacle too. It just makes that pill even more bitter.
I hope that this protest does something
It will. It will make the mods and the power-users realise that Reddit don’t care and won’t change course. Then it’s up to them.
I completely agree. Reddit has shown no indication of backing down. They will just wait for it to finish if the lockdown is as short as ~48 hours. If a major/big sub goes on lockdown indefinitely, they’ll open it and replace the mods. I’m pretty sure there are tons of people out there willing to mod a big subreddit like r/videos for one reason or another. The reddit of the digg migration era is gone. It’s just corporate reddit now.
