Another Buy it for Life community (for the sidebar)
Another Buy it for Life community (for the sidebar)
There are now two BifL communities in the free decentralized world:
Perhaps each wants to mention the other in the sidebar?
There's actually two more, !buyitforlife@sh.itjust.works, and !buyitforlife@lemmy.world.
Unfortunately, the 3 other BIFL's are no longer moderated. Their creators jumped in and created them during the reddit exodus (which is when I came here), and at some point left for whatever reason.
Due to their lack of moderation, I don't feel comfortable linking to them. But also, I've come to the opinion that the fediverse is still small enough that I think it's best to consolidate similar/exact communities where it makes sense to do so.
Sometimes it does make sense to have multiple, like if their instance would contribute a unique culture, or set of rules, or some other variation that would be lost if consolidated, so I think it's best to approach consolidation on a case by case basis.
In the case of BIFL, all of them are going for the same goal, which is to find durable stuff. I guess the one here is slightly unique in that it encourages DIY solutions, but not to the exclusion of normal suggestions, so I don't really see the benefit to having multiple, but that's just my 2 cents. :)
I deliberately omitted those two. Notice I said “in the free decentralized world”. The
sh.itjust.worksandlemmy.worldnodes should not be promoted because they are centralized (by two factors) and antithetical to the purpose of the fedi.- factor 1: disproportionate size thus concentration of power by those admins over an unacceptably large population.
- factor 2: cloudflare, who currently decides who gets access to ~20—30% of all websites in the world. CF abuses their power and they marginalize several demographics of people (including poor people who live in regions where ISPs have to use CGNAT).
So I suggest not feeding those communities. It might be interesting to replicate their content here in such a way that it doesn’t link back to them.
It’s worth noting as well that Cloudflare’s breakage proliferates when CF’d nodes crosspost outside of their walled garden. E.g. if a CF-sourced image is crossposted to slrpnk.net, the image is inaccessible to me (and everyone else CF excludes) so I get a half missing post. Many people are here in the sufficiently decentralized portion of the fedi to escape abuses of concentrated power.
Notice I said “in the free decentralized world”
I wouldn't have known what you mean by that without context.
factor 2: cloudflare
I wonder if they would be interested in alternatives to cloudflare. I'm assuming it's the easiest one to deploy, but they may be open to alternatives if it isn't too much trouble to switch.
As a user of
sh.itjust.works, I was unaware of the Cloudflare issue, and I still do not fully understand it. What does Cloudflare do, and what problems does it pose to my instance and the Fediverse as a whole? Should I be petitioning my admins to move to an alternative?As for the disproportionate size, I think that is somewhat inevitable, even with a Federated platform. There will always be a small number of large instances and a large number of small instances. I'm not sure if size alone is a reason to migrate a community, though if a more active equivalent exists on a smaller instance, that should obviously be celebrated.
It might be interesting to replicate their content here in such a way that it doesn’t link back to them.
That is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure if it would work in this case. Many posts are in a Q&A format, and if a bot were to crosspost all the content here, any answers here wouldn't necessarily make it back to the OP. Had you considered this? In general, I think that we ought to be strengthening ties between instances rather than weakening them.