Platforms like Reddit and Tumblr need to optimize for growth. We need to have growth, but it is does not be optimized for it.

Yeah, things will work like a little elitist club, but all newcomers need to do is find someone who is willing to vouch for them.

We could have a constellation of smaller service providers, like we do for email nowadays. Everyone talks about Gmail+Outlook having 80% of the market, but we all forget that the tail still exists and that is made of hundreds of independent companies which make a healthy living charging $20-$50/year.

Voting has always been about whether you agree or not with an opinion

No, that is absolutely false. Before Reddit's Eternal September, voting was used as a way to signal quality content and it pretty much was followed by a good majority of the people.

Right-wing as in neo-nazi? I would not join a community in that server.

And this is precisely what people are talking about here. You might not see that way, but tankies are extremists. There are people that don't want to join any conversation there, and therefore this is why they want alternatives.

Think of what?

It makes they think "what is so bad about this comment that it really warrants the downvote.

Does not voting against your post not count as compliance?

I didn't ask you to remove the downvote. I asked you only to explain your reasoning, which is now quite clearly faulty.

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.

Correct, so when I post my song I created to Funkwhale, it’s then federated across the fediverse, living on other servers and able to be downloaded.

AFAIK, the songs do not get distributed across the Fediverse, only the link to the original server.

Someone in the fediverse likes my song and they download it. Who then protects my license and attribution rights beside myself?

How is it different from you hosting your songs on your own website?

How is it different from songs you made available through Bandcamp? Does Bandcamp go chasing people pirating your work and/or using in unlicensed cases (e.g, playing in a commercial setting)?

Sounds like something that could be useful for Lemmy itself, no?

Can we sidestep the usual complaints about federation or instance-specific issues? Instead of worrying about the potential roadblocks, let's look at the end goal and work our way back.

Onboarding new reddit users is not difficult. The system that I built for fediverser is running just fine on alien.top, and people can sign up with their Reddit login and already get auto-subscribed to all the relevant communities. If more instance admins decide to use it, I could even add it to https://fediverser.network where anyone coming from Reddit don't even have to choose an instance, and we just redirect them to the ones that are available and with the most affinity.

The real challenges now are related to chicken-and-egg of content. People don't want to leave Reddit because that's where their communities are. Moderators don't want to leave Reddit because that's where people are. The mirror bots were meant to solve one side of this, I'm just missing a good, easy, censorship resistant way to make the bridges.

The largest Mastodon instance (mastodon.social) has 360k MAU. This means that one can crawl all of its activities with less than 5 requests per second, every day.

Even with rate limits, the Fediverse is still so small that I could crawl the top 10 mastodon instances in less than a day.

From my desktop PC.

On my shitty DSL.

Anyone thinking that bullying one developer into a well-meaning project will be enough to keep their "secret clubs" away from malicious actors are in for a sad realization.

This is just the result of a lack of quality or subject control.

This is just another way of saying "having mods enforcing super strict rules", which then leads to an ossified culture and a bunch of mods high on their power trip. This was also seen on Reddit and StackOverflow.

Unfortunately, the way to avoid "lowest common denominator" issues that you mention is by going to the places where the denominator is relatively small, but big enough to have network effects in its favor. My experience was that all subreddits between 25k to 500k subscribers worked really well without excessive policing. Between 500k and 1M it could still go by, depending on the moderators. After crossing that mark, things started to deteriorate fast.

If we were to scale that to Lemmy, it means that all communities with a subscriber count >= 1% of the total network will fall into "deteriorate fast" territory.

That is not true. Twitter was not profitable and they were never "honest". They engaged in ad tracking and data mining like all Big Tech.

Look, we can hate Twitter and Musk all we want, but (a) the headline is absurdly false and (b) charging small amounts from every user instead of having an ad-funded business is probably the most honest and fair way to have a healthy internet and I for one would welcome the change. If Twitter becomes paid-only and removes all advertising and tracking (that's the the big if) it can find its way to become the only sustainable and (dare I say?) ethical social media network around.

I strongly believe that a lot of the decline in the quality of civic debate and the increasing polarization of our society is unhealthy and can be traced back to the point where online media started depending on "eyeballs" and advertisers. (Don't believe me? Just check the headline and read the article, now see how it outright LIED in the headline to make you click). Every news media channel became more and more tabloid-like in a desperate attempt to keep their viewership numbers, quantity over quality became the norm and everything became a "market audience" segmented to perform well to specific editorial guidelines.

To have meaningful change and actual progress, we need to have a healthy media that is focused on pursuing the truth. The current landscape is just a popularity contest. If people are able to vote with their wallets and if they become more than just a number , the people holding the megaphones will win more by paying attention to us than by treating us as cattle who can be milked out.

What I did in the very beginning:

• don't worry about the instance that you are on. My server is quite generic and is meant to be a simple entrypoint to the fediverse, not a "community in itself".

• Go to the mastodon directory to find the list of servers based on interests. fosstodon is one for FOSS enthusiasts, beekeeping is for those interesting in gardening, mountains.social is for those that like hiking, etc. The important thing here is to find servers that are not huge, but that have an active userbase.

• Now, the real trick: for all these servers you found that could be interesting, you go browse at the federated timeline. This will give not only the activity from people in the server, but you will also see what they are following, boosting, etc. To me this was a way to find not just interesting people, but who the interesting people are following as well.

• Be very generous when browsing these timelines, and follow as many as you can possibly can. During the first week, try to add 50 a day.

• Follow hashtags. This will also make your timeline more lively and will bring different people who might be interesting to you.

• Write an intro post, and pin it to your profile. Usually pinned profiles are always visible between servers, so it will make it easy for people to interact with you.

• (Somewhat controversial, but I do it) If you have people that you like to follow on Twitter, follow them on Mastodon as well via a BirdSite mirror. You won't be able to do it from the larger instances, but if you join a more chill instance (like mine ;)) it should be fine.

• Evangelize: if you have friends on Twitter, ask them to join as well. Most Mastodon servers have a way to let you send invites to others.

When you start getting the feeling that you are getting overwhelmed, it's the time to cull down the list. Feel free to unfollow any person or hashtag that you think is too noisy or not really interesting.