I'm not arguing for "commercial revenue as a raison d'être". I'm arguing that it's a numbers game.
Even if 100% of the people here on this small, elitist, open web were "good" (which is not true), a web that is universal and only 10% "good" would be better.
Yeah, totally understandable. I was going to suggest you to create a throwaway account, but then I realized that I am actually considering denying access to newly created accounts precisely to avoid bots and sockpuppets.
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.
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.
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)?
The "problems" I am trying to solve are a bit like bug #1 on Ubuntu's Issue tracker:
I hoped that all the things that I've worked on with Communick were made to the sense of mitigating these problems.
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.
I'm doing that for 4 years already and I'm arriving at the sad realization that no, not enough people care about "sustainability", "privacy" and even less about the actual benefit of using a social media platform that doesn't exploit user data and their attention.
more people you have the likelihood of someone being educated in the subject grows.
It goes beyond that. If you have experts who want to use social media to grow their audience, they will go where the audience is. If this network continues to stagnate or tries too hard to keep the bottom 90% of the users, it will never attract the top 1% which are crucial to its survival.
Given that until last year I was working on a self hosted open source payment gateway for ERC20 tokens, you can bet that I already have an idea of how I would do it. And it certainly wouldn't involve BTC or any of its forks.I already had a prototype of a payment gateway that could route payments through Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, Raiden, Loopring and even CEX like Uphold.
But this is a topic for another day.
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.