Ernest actively does not accept any help.

The project page is listing 5 names under contributors. He has received a grant from NLNet and seems to be promoting other sponsorship programs. Seems like he is not above asking for help. Quite the opposite, actually. He is basically begging for the "community" to support him financially, but seems that very few (kbin is getting less than $100/month on Patreon and ~$90/month on liberapay) are listening.

But he should have formed a team around him to carry the load

How do you "form a team" if there is no meaningful income? I don't know about him, but I would feel pretty embarrassed to even ask other people to work on something if I am not offering something tangible in return. And to be quite honest, I wouldn't trust anyone that accepted a pitch that could be summarized as "hey, would you like to come work on this project that is sucking the life out of me, gives a ton of headaches and forces me to deal with a bunch of entitled users?"

Third-party login is not going to change the fact that Lemmy servers (like every other server on Activity pub nowadays) connect the user identity to the server domain. It will maybe save people from creating yet another password, but that is about it.

Never been to a pub?

Have you been to any pub where the conversation goes around one specific topic and there are moderators to make sure the conversation stays within its guidelines? I surely haven't.

Maybe I misunderstood you. I thought you were calling for licenses that force companies to pay. Dual licensing is indeed an option if a company wants to pay to use free software in a closed product.

Re: bureaucracy. If you have any thoughts on how to get a public-funded system that can allocate resources (a) efficiently (b) at a large scale and ( c ) without falling to politicking and power games, I'm all ears. Myself, I still believe that market-based approaches are better, and that we should leave the government only to (local-level) regulations.

If you want the government to be the one financing FOSS developement, who will be in charging of managing the purse if not the bureaucrats?

Dual license so that corpos pay for it

Strongly disagree. If you start putting restrictions around who should have the right to Free Software, it is no longer free. It is because of shitty "source available" mentality that I, as an small indie shop, can not offer hosting for interesting solutions for other companies. If Lemmy or Mastodon were not AGPL, I would never had touched it.

duopoly when it comes to email providers

There is no such thing. There are a ton of smaller players besides MS and Google. Just as an example: I've been a migadu.com customer for years, paying $19/year for a couple of very important domains.

you were unable to grow (the mirror instances)

I was. It was so successful that there were people complaining about it, because they felt they were feeling tricked by it. The growth was there, I stopped (most of) the bots because the growth was not serving the intended purpose.

If they can't even be arsed enough to create a login in order to make a community

You are missing one thing. The topic-specific instances are not open for registration. I do not want it to be a home of users, I want it to be the home of communities. This is based on the idea that your identity should not be tied to the domain.

It's not because I like basketball that I'd ever want to have an @nba.space account. It's not because you like to self host that your identity should be reduced to a selfhosted.forum domain, etc.

This is the gist of the "Federation and Identity" post. The things that I am working on will hopefully make it clearer, but for now suffice to say that the reason that people can not create communities on their own is because they are closed for registration and this is by design.

Only one pub in your town?

1. Physical locations are limited by physics.

2. People don't go to a pub to talk around specific topics and interests

Sorry, we are not going to agree on this. Fragmenting groups for the sake of it serves no purpose other than keeping some misguided notion of "ownership".

I'm getting the feeling that you are talking about things that more specific to Fediverser (the tools to help migration from Reddit to Lemmy, which is mostly an open source project) than Communick (which is a professional hosting service). But anyway.

You’re not emotionally involved nor committed.

My email provider is not "emotionally involved or committed" to my emails. Yet, I still trust them they will do their best to keep me using their services.

So an RSS feed?

An RSS feed does not provide the possibility to interact with the post. There were a good number of conversations between Lemmy users that got started off a mirrored Reddit post.

(Letting users create communities on topic-instances) Bad idea.

Why?

“you know you’re describing nostr”

Which is a myopic take. Nostr has a fundamental issue around identity management. They went too far to the other direction in the decentralization spectrum and will never be able to reach mainstream appeal. The only companies that are going to support it are (unsurprisingly) the ones that are owned or financed by Jack.

What I am proposing is still based around ActivityPub and doesn't throw the baby with the bathwater. Much like identity should not be coupled with the server running it, identity should not be coupled with your cryptographic keys.

I would prefer to see 20 small but equally active communities about baking, over one on the biggest instance.

What you "prefer" has little to do with what people want. I agree that we should strive to spread around different instances, but what is the benefit of having groups with similar interests spread around different communities? If these "similar interests" turn out to not be so similar after all, sure then they can and should branch out. But I don't understand what is the value of favoring an explosion of content spread around. Content discovery is already the biggest challenge in the Fediverse, by fragmenting more than needed we end up with a bunch of people just yelling in their rooms to themselves.

Not the Reddit moderators, the Lemmy World ones.

That's a given. I also promoted it on New Communities. I also made posts announcing the instances. I also asked people here to join. I'm still posting whatever content I think is relevant to these spaces.

Please don't take what I'm about to say as individual call-out, but your comment really will go to "reasons software developers should not listen to the users (unless they are paying for the privilege)" file.

You have a developer who started the project by themselves, got reasonably popular, does more than what Lemmy is doing and when they need help to be able to keep going, the reaction from the people is "don't bother, just move on to this other fork".

I know this is not your intention, but I can't stop picturing a bunch of locusts flying to the next crop.

Finally, some useful feedback. Thank you! Some points valid, others not so much:

what’s the benefit? What does anyone get that they can’t get for free elsewhere?

There is no such thing as a free lunch. There are costs (countable and uncountable) to running an instance. If people don't want to pay out of their pocket to have someone having the service, they will be subject to the whims of administrators, moderators who will be tired of dealing with thousands of reports, cases of developers burning out (just like the one here in this very post), etc, etc.

I don't think any of my customers are paying me "out of guilt". I think that they understand that their time is valuable, they don't want to deal with this shit and my service provides them more value than the amount of money they give me.

Even with the servers (selfhosted/soccer), you've made some tragic decisions.

What are your community ambitions?

What are my community ambitions with these instances? Honestly, none. I did not start these topic-based instances to grow all these communities or to lead this effort. My hope was to take a supporting role, help with technical coordination, figure out issues with the software that are stopping wider adoption, etc. I first created selfhosted because that subreddit was one of the few that was seriously considering moving out of Reddit, and I am on record actually offering the domain to them. They didn't take the offer, so I decided to run it and (at the time) use as a test bed for my work on infrastructure stuff and the fediverser mirrors.

There were indeed some bad calls on this. First, it took me a while to realize that these if no one could join these instances, then no one would be able to create their own community. Second, I was pushing for the mirrors even in places where I was not actually participating, and while I still stand by the idea that having content mirrored from reddit is better than having no content at all, I also accept that all those bots were a net negative for the fediverse as a whole.

Now that I got the grant from NLNet, I will work on fixing these mistakes. The first plan is to let anyone create communities on fediverser-enabled instances (even if they don't have an account there) and it will just require an approval from the admin. Second, I am replacing the bots with "Community Ambassadors" who will be able to reach out and integrate with the existing subreddits in ways that they feel more appropriate

(Lastly, I did respond to Blaze afterwards, I just don't know why I didn't get the notification in the first place.)

We need more decentralization and we need to get more people used to traveling off server and curating their subscriptions, that’s not going to happen with people like yourself trying to herd people towards federation.

I agree with you so much that I don't even understand where this criticism is coming from. I've written multiple blog posts arguing for a less server-centered approach to these open social media platforms, to the point that starting to drop "Fediverse" from my vocabulary and calling it "Open Social Web".

Going back to the football stuff, have you even messaged the mods of the football communities and offered to host them?

I did. I also wrote to the mods of /r/nba and /r/nfl, because I also created instances for that. I got zero responses. The lesson I learned here: with very few exceptions, the mods of really popular subreddits are too high on their power-trip and do not want to risk anything by moving out.

I offer Lemmy, Mastodon, Matrix and Funkwhale for $29 per year. People don't need to worry about anything. It is more capital efficient and resource efficient than hundreds of small "cooperatives" running around.

And if you want to have your own domain, I also provide access to the Fediverse via Takahe for $39/year. If I had more customers, I'd be able to use this money to fund its development further and make it compatible with Lemmy's API as well.

Honestly, I am doing a really poor job at marketing or people are not really willing to put their money where they mouths are.

Speaking as someone who just received a grant from NLNet: I'm glad such a thing exists and I'm grateful for the funds I'm getting which will allow me to pay my bills for a couple of months. But if you told me 5 years ago (when I started working on Communick) that to make a living as a software developer I'd have to depend on the whims of bureaucrats who are playing with money that is not their own, I'd just go apply to Google or go back to my Big Corp.

Centralized economies do not work. Like everything else in the world, the best measure we have to determine if software is "good" is by putting a price on it and seeing how much people want to pay for it.

Also, it's important to point out that this does not mean that we need VC, big corporate structure or any corrupt institution to work. There are indie devs making a killing (50/70/100k€ per month) on their own because they are building something that is valuable and are not shy from charging what they know what their work is worth.

It does show the fundamental flaw of foss software

The problem here is that people conflate "Free as in Speech" with "Free as in Beer". Free Software was never about "not charging" or "pay what you want" or "donation based". It's about freedom to access and modify the software code if you want to do so.

The majority of people here don't want or don't care about this. They just want a convenient way to shitpost online. They want someone else to thanklessly devote their time and resources to the "community", but don't you dare thinking about making money from this.

This need to change. If we want an internet free of big corporations and focused on the interests of "the people", then "the people" (all of them!) need to be willing to put something on the line and fund it.

!corinthians@soccer.forum, mas posso criar pros outros. :)

Will check it out, thank you!

Probably because the url format from photon UI is different. You need to get the link from the "share" button.

For some reason I never got the mention. Yes, soccer.forum (and pretty much all the other instances listed on !communick_news_network@communick.news) are still active and up-to-date.

Also, I'm still waiting for the official announcement, but I do have some good news regarding funding for Fediverser, so hopefully soon I will be able to resume work on the two-way bridge.

How about we get some things out of LW a bit? There is a whole instance for football at soccer.forum, waiting for more people to join in.

You know that you can configure minio to only serve images for authenticated requests, right?

Don't reinvent the wheel unless you have a very good reason to do so.

I was using old smartphones as an example of the amount of excess computing power available which goes unused, not what people can do with it.

Your argument is just missing the point and annoying sophistry. Can you please just drop it?

I feel like one of the issues with these "new plan for X" essays or posts is that readers usually interpret it as something to completely replace the status quo. It's not the case. I'm not saying that everyone should start using this. I'm not saying that everyone should leave Mastodon. I'm not saying that all server-focused software using AP needs to go away.

I'm just saying that the current approach is not the only one and that Mozilla could have benefited from trying something different. I'm saying that Federation might be the right unit of organization for some cases, but that there is a whole world of possibilities where Federation is not so suitable.

I get it, it makes no sense to say that a network with 1M+ active users is "doing everything wrong" and that we need to start anew. I am not arguing the case to change those that are already here. I am arguing for changes that could help those that looked at "Federated Social Media" and went away because this model didn't work for them.

Applying for jobs, applying for government services, buying essential items cheaply, cheap/free education.

None of these things are even close to be available to people in extreme poverty.

Think "no access to running water or sewage systems" levels of poverty, not "living in a ghetto area of an European or North American country".