Mastodon.world and Lemmy.world July 2023 blog post
It's already September and I haven't yet blogged about July... That's partly because of holidays and some personal stuff. But mostly als...
An overdue blog post about the finances and other news from the .world
I'm actually surprised how low the server costs are. Granted, the userbase is not that large, but it makes me optimistic that Lemmy.world survives long-time.
Non profit foundation is awesome to see. It will probably the general structure of all significant long lasting institutions on the Fedi.
I might be out of the loop so I'm genuinely curious - what's wrong with Cloudflare?
The post mentions several times that it isn't popular and that an alternative will be found.
It's the fear of centralization, I believe (correct me if I'm wrong!).
Seeing that the whole point of federation is to decentralize the web, putting everything under the Cloudflare umbrella goes against this philosophy.
The federation philosophy is not going to hold up when users centralize themselves on an instance, requiring that instance to seek out things like Cloudflare just to bare the weight.
Maybe it's about Cloudflare becoming a single point of failure for large parts of the internet?
Iirc it can break federation
I'm loving the transparency around here. 👍
Y'all are wonderful. Thanks for your dedicated effort.
I also appreciated your shout-out to other instances that are active cooperating with .world to make Lemmy a better place. Teamwork makes the dream work.
The idea of a non-profit holding sounds great, but what about collateral damage if shit really hit the fan? Would it not be smarter to have a separate entity for each platform? They could all have essentially the same statutes, boards, directors etc. etc., so in case if one really got under heavy fire, the others wouldn't be affected? I know it means more admin work and probably also requires some governing policies with regards to the funding distribution, but might be cleaner in the end.
This is absolutely the correct thing to do. Do not place all your eggs in one legal basket.
Won't that be an administrative nightmare though? N times the number of income tax declarations etc?
Cheers for the numbers, always good to see transparency for income and expenses
I wonder why Mastodon.world has done so comparatively poorly. I also wonder if Mastodon could be more integrated with Lemmy would that improve things. As awful as twitter is these days, the way it embeds so easily into other content, which lets you click straight to its comments is invaluable. No doubt its on Elon's list of things to ruin, and he'll get around to it eventually.
mastodon.social dominates for one simple reason. The Mastodon gGmbH app now defaults to mastodon.social sign ups.
Selecting instances was confusing the shit out of people, so they relented and simplified the signup process.
That's unfortunate.
Instead of requiring an insurance selection or defaulting to one specific instance, perhaps they could have a handful of moderate/large instances that the app randomly selects between when a user signs up. That would spread out the signups from people who don't understand the instances.
I also wonder if Mastodon could be more integrated with Lemmy would that improve things.
This won't happen. The Lemmy dev does not want Mastodon to be integrated into Lemmy. They say that plenty of other fediverse software already has this implemented, and that Lemmy doesn't need to reinvent what other software does.
The Lemmy dev does not want Mastodon to be integrated into Lemmy.
Something tells me this isn't the last word on the issue. If the fediverse concept is to succeed, then its two (current) largest players need to have some cross-functionality.
Perhaps the fediverse will get big enough that third-party developers will step in to fix this. Twitter & Reddit both benefitted hugely from the extra functionality third-party developers enhanced both platforms with.
Its anathema to the whole concept of the fediverse that one person - a lemmy dev - gets to decide something so important.
The existing integration works suprisingly well given the different use cases. Bettet than Masto and Peertube.
Unfortunately Mastodon not supporting group actors is the main difficulty in the integration on its end. Lemmy has hacks like auto-boosting thread posts, but kbin and peertube don't so you can't get thread posts without following the post author.
I think allowing user following (allow subscribing to user pages) and handling tags (which I'm not sure the right approach, probably can fit in whatever multicommunity feature gets developed) are the only missing things on the Lemmy side.
If you want that you can check out Kbin. It's like Lemmy but also has a microblogging section that relatively flawlessly integrates mastodon content.
1 for kbin (which I am commenting from). I initially chose kbin because I liked the UI more than Lemmy's, but I've come to really appreciate the fact that it supports microblogging as well.
Maybe I'm missing something, when I try to interact with Mastodon from futurology.today there's zero ability to interact. It seems to give the option to send DMs, but when I test it, they never arrive.
i’m thrilled to see that the donations are letting this be somewhat self sustaining. obviously a lot of unpaid volunteering going into this so not quite a self sustaining non profit, but it’s got all the promising signs
Thank you for all the work you guys do! Glad to see server expenses are coming in under budget of the donations!
Great work! Although I'm far too busy with other stuff I'd love to be able to contribute some Terraform when and where I can. Maybe you could put some stuff in a public repo so we might contribute?
The stuff in our repo is quite sensitive, so probably won't ever be public. If your interested in helping. Feel free to fill out a application. It's in the side bar on the home page. 😎
Love it! I’m happy to keep supporting this endeavor and community.
So from one sysadmin to another great job! Keep it up and I can’t wait to see where this goes! 🍻
Keep up the good work!
You're making great progress.
Quite interesting to read! UP LEMMY!
Out of curiosity, why is Cloudflare so heavily despised? It sounds like the service works well?
Mods? That's great! It's going to be totally different this time!