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.

environment more hostile to discussion and honest exchange.

"Voting" and "discussion" are separate things. The old forums did not have voting but still had polarization, personal attacks, hellthreads, etc.

The problem is that Reddit/Facebook turned "voting" from a tool meant to measure "quality" (e.g, this post is relevant to the community, this comment does not add to the discussion) into a tool to measure "popularity" (I agree with this, so I vote up. I don't like this, so I downvote).

Either get rid of voting altogether, or let's bring back a culture where "votes" are meant to signal quality.

There are some RSS readers that will download the actual URL and apply "reader mode" on the page to present the full article. I think FreshRSS has such a plugin.

We already have instances that go down or suffer from intermittent federation issues when lemmy.world gets a bit more active. The most conservative estimates are putting Reddit at 75 million DAU. If we get to 1% of that, you can bet that our current network would choke, badly.

Not only we need more instances, we also need to be a lot smarter about their organization and how to architect this network. I think we will only be able to grow larger if we make a more intentional separation between topic-based instances and "people-home" instances, so that we can have a better spread of the load.

Wait, why?

Are you saying that there is something wrong with all the communities you listed (to which I would also add !main@selfhosted.forum) ?

Are all the moderators against "believing into taking things into their own hands"?

It seems like yet-another community is just a manifestation of NIH syndrome. If you want to do it because you enjoy the exercise, fine. But then it makes little sense to also try to attract people that are already happy in other communities.

In the end, this seems like it does very little to help the ecosystem. Lemmy (and the Fediverse) in general is already struggling to keep people engaged, and this constant and unnecessary fragmentation makes everything worse.

I'd seriously ask you to reconsider this initiative. Let's strive to look for the best of things and keep united instead of sowing more division.

You could fix it with a relay, or having the instances conn extend with the rest of the Internet through a VPN/proxy.

Yeah, a PITA but can still be worked around.

Using a CDN does not come without downsides, though. Cloudflare itself is becoming another "too big to fail" entity of a system that is not supposed to depend on the resilience/capacity/budget of any single actor.

Personally, I'd rather see a tiered architecture for data, where servers are only responsible for guaranteeing the data from actors on their own servers, but everything else stored in a distributed, append-only stream of data. This would make a lot cheaper to run individual instances and would allow clients to obtain the data from multiple sources.

The whole idea in the first place was to NOT be corporate

The idea is that the network should not be owned and controlled by a corporation, not that no corporation should ever participate in it.

Besides, how "corporate" is a startup with a few dozen developers working on a fully open source project?

Your whole wordlview is hinging on two conflicting realities:

• social networking is an inherently public activity, and this is the way that the majority of people want it to be.
• the only way to be free from surveillance capitalism is by having private communications, and while this is something that affects everyone, only a minority of people seem to be actively opposed to it.

The "consent-based" social media does not work well for a small business owner who wants to promote their place to their local community, or the artisan that wants to put up a gallery with their work online. They want to be found.

If you tell them that they have to choose between (a) a social network that makes it easier for them to reach their communities or (b) a niche network that is only used by a handful of people who keeps putting barriers for any kind of contact; which one do you think they will choose?

What your recent articles are trying to do is (basically) try to shove the idea that the majority should change their behavior and completely reject a public internet. You are basically saying that the "social" networks should be "anti-"social in nature. This is, quite honestly, borderline totalitarian.

But that’s not feasible for broad data harvesting by Meta.

Why? You keep writing about how evil Meta is and their infinite amount of resources. If you really believe that, why do you think they would stop at the mere wall of "federation consent"?

Thank you for the effort to understand my perspective. It's much appreciated.

You are definitely right in a lot of your assessment. I am disappointed at the sheer amount of people who claimed to want to leave Reddit but never took any action about it. I am disappointed at mods who were all protesting about the changes but when push comes to shove, the large majority of them simply were afraid of giving up and losing their "power". I absolutely agree that any approach that ends up patronizing users and telling them how awful their choices are will cause them to be more resistant to change and aligned with the status quo.

The one part that I strongly disagree is the notion that "if someone wants to stop using a platform they can just stop using the platform": Social media (as we know it, with centralized control by a handful of corporations) is made to be as addictive as the most powerful drugs, and peer pressure is one of the strong behavior-regulating forces.

We can not wait until "things start to suck", because by then people will more likely than not just move on to the next crappy corporate-controlled media. What I believe is that we need a coordinated effort and that we need to act as an intolerant minority to fight against it. And I know that I am not getting everything right off the bat, but I hope that at least I can gather enough support to make this a credible threat to the status quo.

People build on top of each other's work all the time. That's normal and good.

If the people selling are passing someone else's work as their own, that's stealing. Otherwise, it's just Free Software working as intended.

If someone is writing software but wants to prevent redistribution, then go ahead and make a license that forbids it. But then don't get to call it "Open Source" or anything like that.

Unfortunately, I agree. I bought the Fairphone 3+ expecting they would keep the form factor to allow for upgrades in the modules, but with the FP4 they went from a company that had a clear market position to plain greenwashing.

I'll keep hoping they reverse course now that they changed the CEO or that frame.work decide to enter the space as well.