ActivityPub C2S is not the the solution. It still requires a server and it still keeps the admins in control of everything.

ActivityPods seems to be going in the right direction, though…

How many people like you are using PieFed right now?

360 currently

Please, read things in context. I’m talking about moderators.

Are all the 360 PieFed users also community moderators?

And by doing so, it makes it available only for moderators with accounts on piefed. What is the current TAM? 20 people?

A separate tool could connect to any server federating “Report” activities. What is the current TAM? Any moderator of a group, no matter if their account is on Lemmy/PieFed/PixelFed/Misskey/Mastodon…

“moderation duties” and “regular participants” in a forum system have such different use cases, it makes no sense to try to make it work with the software itself.

It would be better/faster/easier to simply build a separate tool that can be useful for moderators, instead of trying to shoehorn it in the existing API. But I don’t really think that this is something that really bothers people enough, given that last time I asked if I could get 20 people interested to sponsor the development of the moderation tool, and to this day only one person showed up.

If you want it to be “free to most users”, the cost of data storage and IO will completely dominate over the cost of CPU.

There are plenty of good arguments to prefer Rust over python for a distributed application, but “language efficiency” is not one of them.

Anyway, if you are biased in favor of Rust and want a decent argument to justify it, I will let you use ‘It’s easier to compile Rust to WASM and have the application run on the browser, while compiling python in a cross-platform way is a nightmare’, free of charge.

Generally, because I think all server-centric AP software is broken and I want to see a client-first application to browse the social web.

Particularly in relation to piefed: it seems to be focused on the exact opposite (giving more power to the server admins) and it takes a good page of social engineering / “nudge theory” principles to guide its design. Much like Mastodon, it seems to be strongly opinionated about how people should behave and it kinda gives me an icky feeling about its culture.

One more reason to be asking for help from the community and to be doing everything in the open.

He doesn’t need to know everything. No one is expecting him to deliver flawless software. But I’d have place more trust on someone that works in the open than someone who keeps saying “next week!” out of fear of being judged by the initial quality of their software.

I want to support the guy, but damn does he like to overpromise and underdeliver…

We’ve been hearing about Loops being open sourced (which would imply the ability to be federated) for months already. Just publish the thing and let the community help, @dansup@mastodon.social !

Lemmy account age and Github experience are absolute orthogonal data points, how is that even something to be brought as an argument?

If you want to suggest features or improvements, please take a look at the Github repository.

Listen to Bernie:

The solution is to go to subscribe to Reddit RSS feeds so that we find stuff to repost here.

(Only half-joking)

Have you tried running any of the alternatives for more than a few hundred users?

Mastodon is bad for small and single-user instances because it wasn’t designed to serve so few people. Once it starts growing beyond a certain level of activity, most of your overhead is on sidekiq/redis side of things.

I’ve seen the Pleroma devs openly saying that their service can not handle more than 20k users, because they rely on the database to build the timeline and they don’t have a strong caching system.

So yeah, there are a bunch of tradeoffs and Mastodon is not trying to optimize for anything in particular. But once it reaches a certain size the operational cost (per user) does go down.

Mimic what paid online news does

I could easily write an essay connecting the rise of populism and the fall of civic society to our loss of real journalism, and another 1000-word post arguing that paywalls are just a bad band-aid trying to cover the deep wound caused by eyeball chasing “infotainment”.

These “fake” paywalls are just an attempt from the news publishers to have both ways and make revenue both from the paying customers and the ones that may be okay with ads.

Also, if the admin deserves compensation for their time, why don’t I get a pretty penny for this?

People love to hate the Brave browser, but their system pays 70% of the revenues to the end user. If you manage to convince more people to use it, it would be perfect. End users would get some $ from accepting the ads and they could kick some of that back to the sites they wish to support. The whole economy could grow and everyone would have their incentives aligned.

You know what the problem is? People were looking at the 2-5 bucks of crypto tokens that they would get and instead of using them to stimulate the economy they would just hang on them for the speculation of profit. Individual greed and penny-pinching turned one of the most viable alternatives into another tool for crypto grifters.

My mention of drugs/booze/cigarettes is completely non-judgemental. I am not saying that is bad if people spend money on that. I am just pointing out that, yes,.some people do spend money on it and they are not expecting to keep partaking in their pleasures for free.

Reddit is having trouble monetizing

They do not. They are making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue with their advertising.

We have no tools against capitalism.

Trade and commerce that prioritizes small business is already a big weapon against globalism and Corporatist Capitalism.

Focusing on closed-loop, sustainable economies is a tool against Capitalism.

Community-led investing that prioritizes long-term wealth building is a tool against rent-seeking enterprises that stimulate zero-sum games.

You are definitely underestimating the number of broke people here.

If I am, then the discussion should be “how can we have a sustainable system that gives a fair wage to those working on it , while not stressing those who can not afford even 2 bucks per month?” instead of this “you can not charge from everyone because you are not empathizing.”

Once we reframe the discussion, we should be able to propose things like:

• “pay it forward” systems, where those who can afford more pay for those who can not. Let them become responsible for who to invite. (I have implemented this at Communick, by the way, and so far I had only two people paying for others.)

• Selling ad space for ethical businesses. Back in 2007 there used to be a network of bloggers who did not want to pollute their pages with adSense, so they got together and created a system where companies would pay $5k to $10k to have one slot and all bloggers committed to display this banner during the whole month. Something like that could be done here as well, if “making money” wasn’t such a capital sin.

• focus on making this normie-friendly. Stop with the political bickering and organize the topic-specific instances (which I already offered for other admins), use them to attract a larger audience so that we have more “actually I can pay a few bucks per month” crowd to dilute the “I am anti-establishment but I can not afford to fight against it” crowd that seems to dominate so far.

The latter.

You of all people here should know that the cost of running the service is not the real issue. Even if Mastodon takes 3x as much hardware to run as Lemmy, the cost of hardware is still pennies per user.

Mastodon because it is the largest number of instances and users, but the principle is the same. It hasn’t happened with Lemmy yet because this subset of the Fediverse is ridiculously small compared to Mastodon/Pixelfed

expectation that donations should cover admins labor costs

Not quite that. The argument is that admins shouldn’t be treated as a disposable entity who don’t need any money just because they are not directly asking for it.

It’s a “I want you to want to do the dishes” kind of thing.

Shut the instance down, find someone to help you maintain the instance, or pass the instance off to someone else.

Easier said than done. We already have a long list of instances that disappear suddenly because the admins burned out, and I have had long discussions with admins from other instances who keep begging for more donations every month instead of just saying “you know what? You don’t want to help me, so I don’t owe your lot anything”.