Are we going to turn this community into a place for feature requests?

that they are offended on behalf of their community members

I’m talking about cases where there aren’t any community members to speak of.

you just take out the trash

I don’t know what it is, maybe it’s some form of ikea effect, where people think that the act of filling a form, adding an icon and a description makes them immediately attached to something that (initially) amounts to a record field in a database.

I’ve lost count of how many people I asked “Hey, I saw you are the mod of <mostly inactive community on large instance>, I am running <slightly active/mostly inactive community on topic-specific instance>. How about we join forces?” And almost invariably they act like I am asking them to give me their firstborn.

C2S has a very specific usage, and if you meant “regular clients”, you’d do better by qualifying the API you were talking about by specifying the application - i.e, Mastodon, Lemmy - than by throwing a meaningless term.

c2s api like most other bots

Maybe you mean “bots using the ad-hoc APIs from the servers”? AFAIK, there is no server implementing C2S ActivityPub, so it would be hard to have bots making use of them?

• Sign up to Fediverser
• Search for communities for your interests.
• The community should be associated with a subreddit. If it’s not, you can make a suggestion for the change.
• Apply to become a Community Ambassador. I’ll approve it. Once you are approved, you will be able to do the following:
  • See the posts from the subreddit that is associated to the community.
  • Send DMs to people on Reddit, inviting them to join Lemmy and your community
  • Add other sources of contents (RSS feeds)

There were more things that I had planned, such as the ability to do one-click repost of interesting links, but I didn’t get to it because that would mean effectively that I would have to turn the fediverser site into a an alternative Lemmy frontend.

I really wish more people had taken on the “Community Ambassador” work that I’ve done for https://fediverser.network/. It could be really helpful in creating a focal point for everyone that wanted to help the migration of people interested in a specific niche.

She touches on the aspect of monetization and claims that “you could save money by being on the Fediverse”.

Yes, in theory it is possible. In practice this is something that only is available for the already-famous journalists who have enough pull to move their audience from Substack to their own property.

For everyone else, the Fediverse is (a) too small and (b) too “anti-money” to encourage professionals to even try making a living here. They stay on Substack for the same reason that video creators stay on YouTube: it’s a horrible master, but at least it lets them pay their bills.

a right-libertarian

You have no idea how wrong you are, but if this is what you need to believe to sleep at night, I won’t be able or interested in changing your mind.

Quite on the contrary, if anyone seriously tried that it would fail quickly and just result in burned investments

What do you think that Automattic, Flipboard and Ghost are doing? Do you think they are paying people to develop integrations with AP because they are really nice people and have zero intentions of profiting from their investments?

Look, I better leave this conversation. I should have learned by now that there is no point in arguing with ideologues.

would be a very poor substitute most likely

• phanpy is already doing it for Mastodon, and there are plenty of people satisfied with it.
• You have no idea how far one can go by getting a generic training model and fine-tuning on the device
• we don’t need to have something a perfect replacement. We just need “good enough”.
• even if it is not perfect, it is better than the nothing that reactionary “no algorithm in the Fediverse!” crowd is bringing to the table.

That is just not helpful at all, because it destroys the very foundation of what the Fediverse tries to achieve.

Says who? You and the gatekeepers who’d rather have everyone stuck in the past, just to preserve some technical/ideological purity?

Yes, they do like the personalized algorithmic feed, and that is inseperable from the surveillance part.

There is absolutely nothing stopping the personalization algorithms to run on-device or delegated to a separate service from the video feed.

they certainly don’t want to pay for it either.

It doesn’t have to be a “donation/public funding” vs “ads/surveillance capitalism” dichotomy. I bet we can find alternative models of governance and funding, provided we get to a place Fediverse is relevant enough to attract the attention of some small business, media channels, institutions, etc.

There is no point in trying to make the Fediverse a copy of the corporate social media to appeal to users that see no reason to switch.

Again, this is just a lazy cop-out and a perfect display of the hubris here that is so off-putting.

You make it sound that the people using Instagram or TikTok are there because they like the Surveillance Capitalism, or getting bombard by ads, or they are all sucking up to Zuckerberg. Have you ever considered that maybe people are still there because they actually like some of the features they use in the products and they can’t find it here?

“Millions of people”, let’s round it up to 10 million, ok?

Instagram reports 2 billion active users. TikTok reports 1.5 billion, Facebook reports 3 billion. So, the Fediverse as a whole gets maybe to reach 0.6% of the major networks.

Do you want compare only with the Threadiverse with Reddit? Let’s be again be generous here and round it up to 60k MAU. Reddit is reporting around 75 million MAU. So, even if we consider that Reddit is lying like crazy and that 2/3 of the users on Reddit are fake, Reddit is ~400 times larger.

This is cockroach levels of usage.

Yes, the Fediverse will survive. But it doesn’t mean that it ever was relevant.

Without a clear anti-capitalist and anti-oligopolist stance it will be co-opted and destroyed

With this continued “anti-capitalist” stance there will never be anything to be destroyed. Without real investment and resources, this will be forever nothing more than a castle made of sand.

I disagree about “the primary service” of a minority provider. The minority provider can do a lot more than just “send” emails to the larger share, and I think they can be instrumental for us to bring a tool from the intolerant minorities to the mainstream.

I also disagree about the idea of “managed opposition”. “Managed opposition” is what Mozilla does to Google with Firefox. They are paid by Google to be kept around. I am not saying that we should take the Fediverse and seek funding from Threads, or for us to depend on Facebook.

Finally, I have serious doubts that this “prefigurative infrastructure building” is effective. To me it seems like just a collective of aimless rebels who want to keep this universe secluded from everyone else, but it’s just too afraid to say it out loud.

Anyway, thanks for the chat. I understand I won’t be able to change your mind, but to go back to the original topic: I just wish that next time we don’t see someone as “toxic” just because they were not willing to put up with all these silly rules and rituals that everyone seems to follow without questioning.

these companies are at the whim of the large oligopolies

Why? We are talking about FOSS and services based on FOSS, here. Do you think that Google would be able to successfully shut down small email providers without repercussions?

pose absolutely no threat to them

Why is that relevant? I do not particularly care about eliminating the large corporations, at least not from the start. I’d be more than happy if we could grow this ecosystem here to become a sizable share of the overall market.

I’d rather work towards a world where Facebook has “only” 70% of the market to themselves and the rest of us foment a healthy economy sustaining the other 30%, than to keep this delusional idea that a scrappy bunch of nerds are going to be able to take Lemmy/Mastodon/PixelFed/Matrix/XMPP to the mainstream by wishful thinking and “community” alone.

A “cockroach business” is something that has no significant revenue but at the same time takes up so little resources that can be operated forever. This is completely different from, e.g, small email hosting providers like Migadu or some agency that gets real customers to make wordpress customizations.

There’s a difference between an instance trying to duplicate all of fucking reddit

• There were fewer than 200 subreddits being mirrored. This is far from “all of reddit”.
• Some of them were also mirroring comments, but the large majority was post-only.
• I was implementing a bunch of filters to bring the noise down.
• The bots from alien.top were posting only to instances that I also own.
• No content was being pushed out. If the content from alien.top was ending up on your instance, it was because your users were interested in the content.
• Even after I disabled most of the bots (I think that now it’s only mirroring stuff to sfw.community), the ban on the instance persisted.

With botsin.space, we have a good example of what is reasonable to not be defederated

We also have a good example of an instance that is dead. There is no point in giving that as an example, if no one can actually use it.

Wait, not only are you misinterpreting what I said (I used alien.top as a case of for “admins will want to defederate because of resource abuse even when their own users find it useful” and less about “admins will ban any bot-only instance”) but your interpretation directly contradicts your first point.

Yeah, you can add the “reasonable output” qualifier all you want. This would be a subjective point. I for one think that a fleet of 98 bots posting each once a day is not even worth of consideration, but clearly some disagree and are willing to treat the guy as “toxic”.