It shouldn't be like this. If we keep treating the Fediverse as just a scrappy, amateur effort, it will never reach its full potential and it will be forever just a niche thing.

And the "we should not make it available for the public at large because it will lead to abuse" is also theoretical.

Anyway, I'm already on record saying that I don't like the voting system and that we should get rid of it altogether. Voting on content used to be about collective curation, not a constant popularity contest.

I'm also on record saying that we need to stop relying on systems that only give us the illusion of privacy and depend on the software developers for culture shaping.

If making the vote public gets people to be exposed to these fundamental issues of the current design, and leads us to search for better solutions, then I'm all for it.

Why does it need monetisation?

Because the number of people who are willing to put in the work and create quality content without any potential reward is too low to be relevant. Without a credible model for monetisation, content creators will always prefer to stay in the closed platforms. If we want the open web to be a real alternative for everyone and not just a fringe thing, we need to be able to attract everyone.

data vacuumed to sell to advertisers?

Maybe I am getting old, but I do remember the time where "ads" did not automatically imply "Surveillance Capitalism". The problem is not the former, but the latter.

I have no issues with sponsorship in videos or creators plugging their stores/Pateron/Kofi in content.

Easy for you to say, but how many creators do you know that can make a living exclusively off their Patreon? And of those that do, how many managed to get known without putting their content on a closed platform?

You answer are reasonable justifications for why MIT is used, but they also work pretty well to illustrate the title of the post: If you are doing MIT, you are working for free. If you are working with GPL, you are working for freedom.

Ooh, just this week I started toying with a fork of takahe to see if it could be extended beyond microblogging. Some questions:

1. Where have you found a proper documentation of Lemmy's API? All I found on their website was the documentation of the Javascript SDK. If you have something like a Swagger/OpenAPI description of the API, it would help immensely.
2. Why the mix of Java and Go?
3. You mention a new API. Is there any chance that Sublinks could be developed as a more "strict" ActivityPub-compliance system? For example: would it be possible to architect the new features in a way that it only relies on the actor outbox/inbox?

A bit more difficult question: the reason that I was looking at Takahe is because it's the only AP server (that I know of) which supports multiple domains being served from the same instance. For someone providing "managed hosting" like me, it would save me a lot on resources to have one single server for multiple customers instead of having to spawn a new Mastodon server for every one that wants to have their own domain. Is there any "killer feature" on Sublinks planned that you'd say could warrant yet-another tool? Why not contribute to Lemmy instead? Or, if the devs are more experienced with Go, why extend/contribute to GoToSocial?

So if your comment hasn’t been sent out out to other instances, they don’t have it.

What's stopping malicious actors to create an account on the same instance as you and follow you (or your RSS feed) exclusively to pull your data?

Remember "information wants to be free"? That adage works both ways. If people want (or need) real privacy, they need to be equipped with tools that actually guarantee that their communication is only accessible to those intended to. The "ActivityPub" Fediverse is not it. They will be better off by using private Matrix (or XMPP rooms) with actual end-to-end encryption.

You are not going to get that at any of the larger communities. We'll need to grow the niche communities instead, more specific to your interests.

Could you please take a look at https://fediverser.network to see if gives you anything interesting?

Arstechnica is doing blogspam now? This is just a repost from https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-280-million-electric-bikes-and-mopeds-are-cutting-demand-for-oil-far-more-than-electric-cars-213870.

Also, for the sake of diversity, maybe it would be better to have these conversations outside of /c/technology? The original article has been posted on !climate@slrpnk.net and !humanscale@communick.news, both of them seeming a lot more fitting for the topic...

Or if you really care about having a social media network that is made for everyone and not just 27 stubborn people?

This person literally IS trying to just be able to start charging money for someone else’s code.

That happens all the time, never has been a problem, and it should not ever be.

AGPL has a clause that basically says "network access counts as distribution". If you make modifications to a AGPL code which users can connect to, users should be able to have access to the source code with your changes.

Corollary: when content creators start trying to maximize reach instead of relevance or quality, it's time to stop watching them.