Unless the lawsuit is a fabrication, you are literally dismissing a story just based on who is telling it.

If they were shutting down their mastodon instance but continuing their efforts to work on Social Media that is open and not just an instrument of Surveillance Capitalism, you'd have a point.

But they didn't. They shut down the instance because of some internal political struggle and their interest in becoming an ad company themselves.

Political. Steve Teixeira was the one championing the focus on social. Apparently the faction that wanted him out won, and now they are getting rid of his babies, too.

Details of the lawsuit.

They shouldn't be "running a social media", they should be working on making their browser the best client for the Social Graph that is ActivityPub.

Nonsense. There is also /r/football, which is quite large and to me has more interesting discussion than /r/soccer and less obnoxious mods, but /r/soccer still maintains its dominance.

It's not the name that matters. It's the content and the match threads.

I am not arguing that. I am just saying that this is a very lame reason to avoid using it.

If I had found any "football" or "footy" domain that costs less than an used car, I would have used it. But soccer was cheaper, and football@soccer is redundant and kind of senseless.

Buddy, you are running out of excuses... ;)

At the moment the priority is to grow the community enough that’s not only me posting.

I'd be posting as well, and if you see the NFL communities, they are also getting some momentum from Mastodon users.

• Running the topic based instances are not the main costs. Even if I went to shut down Communick (I won't, because believe it or not it's getting close to break even) the last thing I would let go are the domains, which can/could be easily transferred to some organization.

• I can make you moderator of the communities, so it would be one more reason to move there?

That has been exactly my reasoning when I created the topic specific instances, and I have been trying to convince @blaze@feddit.org to get out of LW and into !talk@soccer.forum

Regarding a "general" sports instance, I have setup https://athletic.center/ some long ago, but never got to create communities for it. I was thinking of using it for less sports that are less "professional" and more suitable for hobby practitioners (e.g, sailing, skiing, diving, swimming, CrossFit, etc) the main reason, to be totally honest, is that sport.* are quite expensive.

Open source or GTFO. :)

Seriously, Lemmy is AGPL. Any client you do and any functionality you build on top of it must be AGPL as well.

Now I am confused, are you able to make changes to the Lemmy codebase? A fork? If you want to find a way to fund development, why not just work with the current team?

As a concept, it could be a valid approach. But you need to put actual numbers to see if things make sense:

• What would be the monthly membership fee?
• What would be a reasonable SLA? If there is an outage on a Friday night, are the members okay if they wait until Monday to get it back someone online?
• What do you think is a good hour rate to pay for an admin?
• What should you pay for someone to stay on call?
• Can I run bots? How many? Does each bot count as a separate account?

I think you'll see that as soon as you start asking people to put money and to feel like they "own" it, the demands will increase and so will the costs.

For reference, the one coop I am somewhat familiar is from Mastodon: cosocial.ca. Each member pays CA$50/year for an account. I think this is particularly too expensive. There are other cheaper "commercial" alternatives that charge less:

• omg.lol offers mastodon and some other services, for $20/year
• mastodon.green offers accounts at $2/month
• Communick offers Mastodon/Lemmy/Funkwhale/Matrix accounts for $29/year (Disclosure, I'm founder)

Have the apps API access been officially restored?

No, they won't be and the majority of people didn't care. Which is kind of my point?

private API keys stop working

That will not happen. If they kill the API for good and do the same thing that happened at Twitter, all the bots from Reddit are going to disappear and it's going to cause a hit on Reddit traffic.

The number of people who cared enough about third-party apps is not enough to affect their bottom line, so as long as they managed to get (say, 80% of the Apollo/Sync/Infinity users into the official client is enough)

Nah, there is no more concerted effort from the mods to get people out of Reddit. The mods that still wanted to take action were kicked out, the others that remained are too afraid to lose their "power mod" status or were appointed by Reddit itself to take charge.

it will take some other new event to take place for people to get mobilized again. Reddit won that battle.

It doesn't matter if it's a post of Taylor Swift or someone from /r/wallstreetbets convincing the mob to short RDDT and to move to Lemmy, we are talking about any random scenario that manages to get 300k people interested in Lemmy.

how are instances supposed to handle 300k new users overnight?

They won't. Not at first. First we will get maybe 50k, LW will do their thing and try to gobble up the majority of users, alien.top can also help absorb part of this crowd and I could even finally convince some other admins to set up fediverser on their instances to help with the migration.

But the important thing is that this type of backing from the mainstream would mean free marketing.

do you expect those hundreds of thousands of new users to get a Communick subscription?

All of those people, of course not. But I expect the increased user base and media attention to bring the following:

• more instance admins realizing that this is not sustainable to be run as a hobby
• power users who want to run their own instance
• companies looking to establish their presence online (therefore looking for a quick/simple way to set up an instance)
• increased usage in the topic-based instances, which can open potential revenue streams.
• more people realizing the limitations of the server-centric approach and becoming interested in a single "Social Browser app"

All of those things translate indirectly into more business opportunities, none of which need to sacrifice the ideals of the open social web.

"oh, I want it to grow, I just don't it want to grow with people that I don't like"

You can dress it however you want, it's still elitist, reactionary and exclusive.

Quantity is quality, if you have good filters in place.

I never understood people that argue something is bad by looking at the median case. The problem of Reddit, Twitter and Facebook is not due to the amount of people they have, and they were absolutely fine until they tried to exploit their userbases.

(Aside for @blaze@feddit.org: see what I mean about Fedi's anti-growth and reactionary culture? Our friend here is not an isolated case)

If you are that famous or worried about trademark, you shouldn't be using someone else's server. Tom Hanks can just buy e.g tomhanks.actor domain and set up the @me@tomhanks.actor AP actor.

I keep repeating this: the weird part is that we still have all these companies and institutions being okay with depending on someone else's namespace. Having the NYT still announcing their Twitter or Instagram for social media presence is the same as using aol.com for their email.

marginalized groups, and the fear that someone is creating a database that could be used to easily seek them out and use it for trolling and such.

The fear might be justified. I don't question that the issue exists, but the belief that they can stop it.

Let me repeat: there is no real privacy in any social network. If people are genuinely afraid of being targeted because of what they write online, the solution is not to give them a false sense of privacy, but to educate and empower them to use messaging platforms that are provably secure.

Those that are telling marginalized folks to use instance XYZ because "they don't federate with threads and therefore are safe" think that they are being helpful, but in reality are putting them at even more risk because they are telling all of them to concentrate in the same place and make the targeted tracking even easier for malicious actors.

Yeah, lots of people were trying to point that out, those people were not the ones screaming at snarfed. It was the "mah privacy" crowd that was panicking at the thought of data being available and searchable in a server outside of their own.

Please do take an honest try and let me know what you think of the UX.

Word of warning: the "no admin to censor you" also means "no one to help you in case you lose your account".

No, admins might think of defederation as a way to avoid interaction with larger instances, but in the case of the bridge it was mostly regular users crying "I don't my content going in a place that I do not control", with "lack of opt-in" and "this violates GDPR" being the main reasons cited to be against it.

With Threads is the same thing. The whole thing with users asking their admins to block threads is not because they were worried about Threads pushing too much to the smaller instances, but to block Threads from mining data from the Fediverse to their profit.

If you just want to see the content, you don't need an account. You can just pull the data, like opening up a different website.

What you want is the ability for some other server to push content to a server that the admin might have chosen to say "no, I do not want to have data from them, and I do not want to have my resources used by these users".

You are describing nostr. Why not just use it then?

As a matter of governance, I agree with you: my instance is only blocking one instance and that's because they got reported for hosting CSAM. As an admin, I believe that my users are mature enough and smart enough to know how to filter out what they want to see.

But if you acknowledge that server admins can censor content on their servers, your complaint is only about the way that this is done, not the principle, and you agree that there needs to be an established hierarchy.

Holy crap, the point is going completely over your head.

If having absolute power over the communication channel is so important to you, you can only do that by owning everything. This is not an issue you are going to solve with changes on Lemmy, or Mastodon, or ActivityPub, or XMPP, or anything.

You are arguing where the line is drawn, but the line is not going to go away. Unless you go full blockchain, there is always some aspect of internet communication that it's mediated: the server, the internet provider, the domain registrar.

That people will upload illegal content is basically inevitable, the important thing is that there is someone (other than the original poster) with the authority to remove it.

"real" decentralization was never the goal of Lemmy or any project in the Fediverse.

Again, it seems like you are either stating the obvious or complaining that the people designing the applications have made different trade-offs that you would like.

Lemmy is an half-measure.

There you go, a fully p2p reddit alternative. Now go away and be useful instead of complaining for the sake of complaining.

Admins still need to have control over what goes into the servers. If you are running a server and someone pushes content that is illegal in your jurisdiction, you can not go around asking users to please stop it for you.

Then you defederate from it too.

Okay, let me create an account on mastodon.social and use it to scrape content from every other instance.

Better yet, let me create an account on "i-want-privacy-in-a-public-internet.example.com" and access the federated timeline directly, then I can go and push the content from everyone into this discovery service.

What are they going to do? Unless they go to the point of asking for physical evidence behind the person asking for accounts and/or only give invitations to people they already know, and *completely shut down their own servers to the outside world, they will never be able to avoid data leakage.

And if they do get to do any of this, then what is the point of using anything based on ActivityPub? They will be better off by just using any of the existing group chat servers like Discord (or Matrix/XMPP if they still care about FOSS.)

Yeah, that's exactly the point! How do you think that a decentralized system is any different?!

If everything is "decentralized", you still must have a way to get rid of bad actors. Even nostr is set up in a way that you can not force your node into anyone else's relay.

Forgive my bluntness, but the more you try to argue you point the more it seems you have no clue what you are talking about. There are plenty of things to criticize about Lemmy and ActivityPub in general, but you are missing the mark on all of them.

You are always free to run your own instance, and this is absolutely no different than "decentralizing" everything. The federation model where all users distrust each other degenerates into a fully p2p network.

I think this is a great thing, but it will be massively criticized and shot down by the "Mah privacy" crowd. There is no way to avoid a competing implementation that will ignore privacy requests, and the moment someone finds out their content is out of their home instance, they will come with the pitchforks the same way they came after the bridgy developer.

Like I said, the content did not become unavailable. My instance still has the data from every community being followed.

The only unrecoverable problem with feddit.de is that the domain was lost. If the owner had given the domain to someone else, one could (theoretically) get all the identities back. They would need new keys, but the accounts would still be salvageable.

As for "separate frontend": this is already possible and like I said it is a matter of improving the existing clients. We don't need a fundamental change in the protocols to get what you want, we just need to get more resources available to developers so that they can continue working and improving on what we have.

The content itself is harder to be deleted, because federation means that every post comment gets duplicated on all instances.

You do have a point regarding identity, and this is something that bluesky has solved already in a more elegant way. But this is also fixable with activitypub: as Takahe already showed it is possible to efficiently serve different domains with the same server. And on the extreme case, you can run your instance.

The issues are describing are real, but can be solved with better clients.

Yeah, it's weird. It is showing on popular accounts, though.