The like is an activity. Any activity has an actor. Every actor has a public key. If the activity is sent with a cryptographic signature (like LD signatures, which Mastodon does implement) then any one can verify that the activity is legit.

It's curious: most people on Lemmy fancy themselves "anti-establishment revolutionaries", yet the mere proposal of a job market that breaks away from banks and the status quo causes them to downvote you like you are asking them to join some religious cult.

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.

Ok. I lost track of their funding. Seems like they raised $30M in a series B round in 2021.

Still, look at the timeline. 2021 is not that long ago, and Matrix was already ahead of XMPP in mindshare by then. It's not really fair to say that this money was only spent in marketing, and it is not fair to say that without it XMPP would be making some comeback.

Because this means creating yet another account at a service who is probably not ready to bear the costs of becoming a video hosting provider?

I'm begging people to take a look at my fediverser project, and it already does some of these things.

• You can choose if you want to mirror posts from reddit or posts with comments
• You can choose if you want "self posts" or link posts
• You can set a rate limit of mirror posts (maximum X posts per past 24 hours)
• It doesn't mirror any post if there is already a submission in the Lemmy community with the same URL.

It wouldn't be difficult to add something similar to RSS feeds.

But what I really want to point out is that what we need is not more content per se. What we need is more people participating in the network, our collective goal should be to get all the people who are using reddit/twitter because "that's where most people are" and provide them tools to migrate without making them feel like they are missing out on anything. This is how we can win.

Gitlab is open source, but some features are only available in their Enterprise Edition. As the name suggests, unless you are looking for an alternative for a large company, the open source "Community" Edition is enough for all your needs.

I am working on fediverser, which aims to create bridges between the "traditional" (i.e, shitty) social media networks to try to bring the people who post good content.

Thank you! I've started Communick about 4 years ago as a side-project and today it's the first day that I'm feeling that there are some people that "get it". Now I'm trying to make it my full-time job and the reaction here gives me some hope.

For your questions:

• yes, I will be working on integrations that are going to be specific to the flagship and managed instances. Just yesterday I launched a tool that imports your twitter follows to mastodon, which I hope can help people migrating away from there. If you have any other ideas for features you'd like to see, I'd love to hear them.

• Moderation is always going to be a difficult problem. No matter how we slice it, any decision will make some part of the group unhappy. So far I've been focused more on making sure that the our instances are not the ones causing problems in the fediverse and recommending to block/mute individuals from outside for whatever reason they deem fit. I've also found (so far) that it has been more effective to ask people in our instance to not follow trolls/extremists from outside than to try to argue for an instance-wide ban. But, like I said in the original post, having a paid-instance has done wonders to ensure that all members are there to make the best use of their time and has made things very civil.

With the Mastodon/Lemmy instances growing, I will certainly have to revisit this approach. I am not planning on keeping multiple instances to cater to the different "factions", but I do believe that one way to solve this will be by letting those that disagree with the "main instance" to create a "fork" into a managed instance. For example, it 50 people are on the flagship instance and they decide that they are not happy with the moderation, they can create their own instance (which I would still be hosting) and apply the rules that they seem fit. Price-wise things wouldn't change and they would be probably happier on a "forked" instance than on the main one.

I can sign up on the website, choose one or more Fediverse services and pay the corresponding amount ($8 for Lemmy) each year.

Correct.

You will create and host an instance for me. To create and use an account on “my” instance, people will need to pay you first, the same fee as I do.

Incorrect. The $8/year Lemmy plan gives you access to an account in the "flagship instance". To get an an instance just for yourself, you would be looking into the "managed hosting" plans. Managed hosting is something completely differerent, you are in full control of the instance, the rules, who to invite, etc. This means that this offering of course has different price points.

There will be no ads, all data stored will be only used to run the instances and the billing system.

Correct

You will donate 20 % of your profits to a FOSS organization like the Mozilla Foundation or Lemmy devs.

Basically correct, but the important thing is that the idea that I will be donating to the projects related to services I am providing.

To give a more concrete example: if 30% of the revenue comes from people paying for Lemmy, 40% from Mastodon, 20% from Pixelfed and 10% from Matrix, and if I get $100k in an year profit ( a man can dream), then I will be giving $6k to Lemmy, $8k to Mastodon, $4k to Pixelfed and $2k to the Matrix foundation.

1998?! Try 2008.

having multiple accounts has been accepted as the “correct” way of interacting with fediverse?

No. You are right that there should be a better separation between your identity and the servers that you use to connect/interact with the fediverse. It just so happens that the existing solutions have been "good enough" for the majority of people, and there are many other issues (content discovery, reputation, server scalability...) that seem to be more pressing than that.

However, there are some other projects which are on the way to make it possible for people to use one server but have their identity separate. Mitra uses Ethereum wallets as a way to login to the server, while Takahe keeps separate domains for the server and the user's actor ids, which would let you, e.g, sign up with your own id to any server. This would essentially turn ActivityPub servers into a commodified provider, and people could migrate between servers transparently.