Listen to Bernie:

Setting up parallel sending also would require more resources on their part.

It is your problem to fix, yet you are only willing to take action if the solution comes in the form that is most convenient to you. I genuinely don’t understand why, but I guess it’s between you and the users on your instance.

You won’t be making any changes to Lemmy source code itself, that’s what I mean. I wouldn’t count adding something that is independent from the service as “customizing it”, but if that is what you meant, fine.

That setup required an additional server for AZ

What I had in mind would be to run the relay myself, and you would only have to set up/manage an extra service that could run along your Lemmy process.

You seem to think (…) we’re willfully not taking an action that we should be taking.

Well, yes? You have the possibility to take the initiative and mitigate an issue that is affecting your users, and you can solve the problem independently of the third-party’s cooperation. Why put yourself at the mercy of others when you have enough power and agency?

Looks like everything worked fine except for pulling posts via the search API.

If you want to direct the efforts to move there I’d join you.

I’m not interested in customising the AZ server configuration more than it already is

There would be no customization of Lemmy itself. You’d only have to add a sidecar service.

If you don’t want to do it, fine, no one can force you to. But then perhaps it would be nice to be transparent with your users and tell them that the delay in federation can be avoided.

I responded to you before I had my coffee, so I didn’t realize that you are one of the admins for aussie.zone.

I will tell you what: I am 100% sure that I can write a service that can work as a bulk message relay and I’m equally sure that I can modify Fediverser’s code to make it able to ingest data from the relay. If you want to join Lemmy’s Matrix Room, we can chat to see how to best solve this.

the Lemmy devs are funded by NLNet donations and user donations, no business LW, lemm.ee, lemmy.zip, all of the top 20 or 50 instances are funded via donations

You are looking at this super-tiny space of “the Threadiverse” and taking it as the whole “social media landscape”. This is textbook example of selection bias.

How much do you want to bet that we will see a Reddit-like alternative built on ATProto by the end of the year? Which one do you think will have a better chance of success: the application that is starting of a potential userbase 1M MAU or the one with 25M+? How was Bluesky funded? Was it via donations?

Network effect can’t be fought by money

No, but money can buy infrastructure and development which is sorely needed. We are not limited because people don’t want to leave the walled gardens. They are eager to leave, but we keep failing to offer them an usable alternative.

The reason that Fediverse doesn’t grow is not because of any single particular feature of the other alternatives. It’s quite easy to say “Bluesky won over Mastodon because it has better content discovery” or “Matrix is not a good alternative to Discord because it is slow and has a moderation problem”, but all of these tiny things are not fundamental issues. They can all be fixed, but they just don’t get fixed fast enough because these organizations are lacking in resources compared to the VC funded alternatives.

Funding is like oxygen. Organisms that do not have circulatory systems can only grow to the size of insects. If we keep constraining ourselves to only these very limited sources of funding, we will be forever bound to this tiny insignificant niche space.

There is absolutely nothing in the AP spec that prevents people from pulling data from the outboxes instead of waiting to be pushed.

Alright, so I just learned about [email protected]. It’s a NodeBB instance run by the WeDistribute team, led by @[email protected] and it can interoperate with Lemmy and Mastodon and the mbin family of software.

Can we agree that it is a better fit than any of the existing alternatives?

If you prefer to avoid the conversation on the basis of “unpleasantness” instead of facing the arguments that are being presented to you, it’s your choice.

But at least show some decency and willingness to admit you were wrong and consider that maybe the best way to get a sustainable, healthy and universal Fediverse (i.e, not just a niche thing that barely reaches 1M MAU) is by having small businesses around?

And your tone now is pleasant and agreeable.

Now, it certainly isn’t.

Again, seemed like a risk to me.

What if I told you that Communick has reached break-even point, and since February it makes more in revenue than it costs to operate?

Oh, that’s right, I told you that already! It’s just that you didn’t react to it. Could it be because it doesn’t fit your worldview?

My tone changed after you refused any form of collaboration and resorted to the most absurd excuses (like the football domain episode).

I wasn’t being hostile to you when you came asking if you could have access to the user votes. I thought it was something visible for moderators, but when you said that it was only for admins I even offered to host an instance for you for free. All you needed to do was get a domain name. You refused.

So? I never said I want to make money out of the instances.

I am interested in system administration

Yeah, right…

What upsets me in this whole thing is that you present an impossible dilemma: if I run the instance, you won’t participate because you think it is associated with the money-making business. If I say “okay, then you go find an instance that is topic specific and and only for groups”, you find any possible reason to balk.

So here we are: you want to have someone that can focus on instance administration and you want to focus on building communities, but God forbid you even consider doing it a way that is only tangentially connected to a commercial venture. That is the part I don’t understand.

lemdro.id also has communities like “Microsoft” and “ChatGPT”. “Linux” is only tangentially related to programming.

wouldn’t it also be nice if you volunteered some of your time to keep your communities and instances active

They are not “my” communities. I started the topic-specific instances as a way to help the general ecosystem and to have a destination for the alien.top posts. I was hoping that would help bootstrap more usage outside of the larger instances. I may post from time to time when I find anything interesting, but I do not hold any pretense to keep all 15+ instances and 200+ communities fresh with content all the time.

As stated above, I’m as interested as sysadmining than you are in community building

I am interested in the community building, I am just not committing to do it for hundreds of them on top of the work of running the instances and on top of developing tools in the ecosystem.

Geographical distance between Europe and Australia

Only because aussie.zone is relying exclusive on waiting the data to be pushed. If they pulled the data in bulk, latency would not be an issue and the problem would be immediately solved.

topic-based instances hosting the following communities

Aside from mander.xyz, the other instances are not topic-specific. They have communities which are focused of a more general scope, and its users are not focused on conversations around an exclusive topic.

Anyhow, the point is: as of yet, there is no one running an instance focused on Fediverse news and discussion. Wouldn’t it be nice if you, I don’t know, volunteered to do so?

Ah, sorry, I wasn’t complete above: I meant a diverse set of mods and admins

I am sure you can find people to help you co-admin the instance as well, if you set one up.

The only instance having delays is LW.

It’s not a problem with LW but aussie.zone taking too long to respond to the data being pushed. There are instances on the US that fixed this by taking initiative and setting up a system that would active pull the data from LW to keep in sync.

Why would I?

Because you are the most invested in getting people out of LW, and because you don’t trust other people that set up topic-based instances?

diverse set of mods with good track record.

Why wouldn’t this be possible in a separate instance? Is the motivation to volunteer to mod in a community attached to the instance where it’s hosted?

I prefer to have a community where aussie.zone doesn’t have a 3 days delay

Yeah, a community on a topic-specific instances would never cause that, because it would only be a small number of activities.

Who manages that instance?

You. You can go to elest.io and create your own instance.

If you worry about costs, I’ll be sure to contribute with a few cents per month. ;)

How do you prevent power tripping?

How do you prevent power tripping in the community you want to move to?

All this shuffling around for circumstantial reasons gets tiring and confusing.

Instead of spending all this time and energy trying to coordinate large-scale movements it would be a lot easier to just create a separate instance to be the home of the communities and have a neutral ground.

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.