It’s less than $2.50 per month, for 4 different services, and I’m also pledging 20% of the profits to go the open source projects.
I’ve been told by multiple people that I’m actually charging less than what I should. If you think that you can offer all of that for less, please go ahead.
The number of discussions about American politics are orders of magnitude higher than discussions about any of “other topics”. This is more than enough to justify the use of hyperbole.
If one can pay $30/yr for basically a private social network that’s garbage and advertizement free, I think that should be more popular. But to make that happen we need an even easier system to set up;
$29/year to have an account at Mastodon, Lemmy, Matrix and Funkwhale (with 250GB of upload quota to your personal library). No “setting up” required beyond downloading the clients. No ads, no tracking.
and we need the social effect.
Get the $119/year package for 5 people. Invite 4 of your friends. Tell them that if they like it they can split the costs with you or pay it forward by getting another 5-package for themselves and inviting more of their friends.
You want to use the extreme end of the distribution curve and make the argument that it is close to the median case. It is not.
Congratulations. You are bringing your dozen communities that only survive due to your incessant work, which kind of exemplifies my point: Lemmy has maybe a handful of communities outside of the politics/meta-fediverse topics.
If you care about American politics and being outraged at every and any thing thrown at you during the day, it is active enough. However you are SOL if are curious about any other topic that does not involve narcissistically talking about yourself.
Assuming you are invested enough to find or create a community for a topic you care about, be prepared to be talking to yourself for a long time and consider yourself lucky if you manage to get 2 other people commenting on it.
One more of these ridiculous “so you are saying…” comments, and I will start responding to you with Cathy Newman memes.
Definitely not arguing for a monoculture. You are overreacting and reading whatever you want, instead of what I’ve actually written.
I’m not saying “people should leave mbin and use only Lemmy as the end-all solution”. I’m saying “those who are already on Lemmy should not be forced to adopt yet-another tool just because some other alternative fulfills one use-case better”.
mbin might make some of what Lemmy does and it makes some of what Mastodon does, but it is not a perfect replacement to neither. There is always a cost to adopt any new piece of software (and I’m not talking about price, here). If some users are happy with it, by all means let them continue using it, and I hope it keeps improving. But to think that is reasonable to tell everyone “Lemmy doesn’t do this, use mbin instead” is like saying “Linux is not good on the Desktop, use Windows instead”.
Cool! Do you have any instances of your fork running? I am planning to open source the (django) library I am building to integrate the “main” webapp, but at the moment things are still too unstable to document and publish it properly.
Ultimately, if just the right tool is in front of you
That’s the thing. The “better” tool isn’t right in front of me. OP didn’t know about it.
And if they did, they would have to do the whole “which instance to join” dance, again.
And after they joined the instance, they would have to find a mobile app to use. (oh, oh, there isn’t one)
And after they said “fuck it, let’s just use the web UI”, they’d be like "okay, I can follow people from mastodon and I can follow Lemmy groups, but if there is an user that is on Lemmy, it still means that they can only post things to groups. (IOW, incomplete interoperability resulting in functionality silos)
Wouldn’t it be a whole lot simpler/easier if Lemmy had the capability to let the user create posts without referencing any group? Even if it wasn’t the main feature, it could be implemented at the server and documented just enough for those working on alternative clients. The “purists” that don’t care about the functionality would still keep their tools intact, but the others would greatly benefit.
Perhaps “like-minded” is the wrong term, here. The idea is to find people who are just looking for a way to say “do I see myself working with the people on this team?”. If you go through the questionnaire, you will see people also should answer “what answers are also acceptable” and “how important their answer is to you”.
The questions are not about checking people’s backgrounds or rooted in any type of personal topics that could lead to discrimination. They are asking things like “what do you think of scrum/agile” or “do you think that it’s okay for companies to use data on the web for AI, if this means more free services for people?”.
You should hire people based on their ability to perform the job, and nothing else.
That’s a given. But unless we have perfect equilibrium between supply and demand for labor, there is always one side that will have a number of options (candidates in the down-market, opportunities in a growing cycle) and they will always be asking themselves “of all these acceptable options, which would fit best?”. No one will just say “good, we have 20 qualified candidates coming up, so let’s throw a dart and hire whoever it lands on”.
To go back to the webmail example, we could have said “no need for hotmail/gmail because Eudora or Pegasus already exist.” “No need to have Google Maps because MapQuest already has a desktop client”.
Yes, we didn’t really need any of these, but the problem with this thinking is that it assumes that the progress of software application is linear and “intelligently designed”, when it reality it much closer to how actual life evolves, by testing many different adaptations and keeping those that make them more fit to their environment.
It doesn’t matter that kbin already have certain functionality if its main developer was a control freak who was holding back its evolution and its users had not trust in him. There were other features that it was lacking (no API, no third-party clients, not easy to deploy, no moderation tooling, etc) and still do. We can not just tell someone “what you want is on kbin, use that instead”, because there will be different use-cases that kbin does not fulfill.
Software co-evolves. Lemmy should “steal” from mbin, as it should steal from Pleroma, or Mastodon/PixelFed is now “stealing” things from Bluesky. This is wasteful, but is at least robust.
If software was “intelligently designed”, we will not have any server-side platforms and just have “Generic ActivityPub servers” that can handle the messages being passing around actor inboxes, and we would all be using client-side browsers that are aware of the ActivityPub vocabulary. But this will be like the GNU/Hurd of the Social Web, and saying that server software should have each only have one defining feature is a recipe to have the whole ecosystem ossified.
it’s not part of the Lemmy model.
It’s not part of the model yet. There is absolutely nothing stopping it from being implemented, and it could be very useful to do so.
This whole “Lemmy is only for doing this one thing, Mastodon is only for this other thing, Matrix is for this other thing” mentality is frankly short-sighted. There is a common standard that can allow application developers to implement multiple use-cases, we do not need separate accounts/services/clients for each of that.
If that were the case, we would never have webmail and everything would have to have its own specific client that could talk with only one specific server.
Liberals are right wing
Case closed.
Please… this is a serious display of availability bias.
Let’s face it: the demographic here is just a hyper concentrated version of Reddit, which itself is mostly middle-upper class tweenagers from affluent countries. They get online and get convinced that everyone is just like them.
The average person that hangs out on Reddit-like forums absolutely does not represent the population at large, and any “right-winger who can be present in a discussion without spewing a whole lot of vile conspiracy hate fascist bullshit” has learned that there is no way one can have a reasonable exchange of ideas in any forum like this.
We tried at communick.news a while ago, it didn’t work so well. Perhaps the situation has improved, so it’s worth to take a look.
For instance you can’t fetch Mastodon posts from Lemmy.
Having a standard URL scheme would precisely help us develop ActivityPub clients and get rid of application-specific servers.
For the same reason that they have a website: to control their media presence and their means of content distribution.
These are for the people that just want to get access to the flagship servers and not worry about managing their own. Those that want to bring lots of users should look into the managed hosting packages, where they will be no hard quota, and they will only be limited by the hardware resources that will be allocated to them.