It’s brief, around 25:15
https://youtube.com/watch?v=nf7XHR3EVHo
If you’ve been sitting on making a post about your favorite instance, this could be a good opportunity to do so.
Going by our registration applications, a lot of people are learning about the fediverse for the first time and they’re excited about the idea. I’ve really enjoyed reading through them :)
I wish he had mentioned Lemmy, but it’s understandable that he didn’t. Also Bluesky isn’t an alternative to big tech, it IS big tech. I wish it wasn’t stealing so much of our publicity lately.
But beggars can’t be choosers, and we have seen some nice growth over the past couple months. John Oliver fans are the perfect candidates to join the fediverse, hopefully some of them find their way to Lemmy.
I’m really not happy about bluesky their fragmentation of the fediverse protocols is only going to harm us in the long run.
Intentionally, I think.
That’s what I suspect
Have you heard of bridgy?
IMO bridgy is not well designed. The fact that it requires both the follower and the followee to specifically opt in basically makes it DOA. Both Mastodon and BlueSky are completely open and public in terms of post visibility, so bridgy should have been designed to require explicit opt outs from anyone who didn’t want their content bridged.
Bridgy started without that requirement and it pissed off too many Mastodonians so they reworked it
Well fuck the mastodonians their stupidity is no reason to make everyone else’s experience shitter.
I would have put it in less harsh terms, but yes, basically this.
The fediverse hoa had a bit of a problem with it, ignoring the fact that federation is opt out by default.
Yes, but it’s not relevant to the point I was making
shrug, I wish they were with us, but they are also a big ole corporate entity, so I’m kind ok with us staying our our side of the fence. As they need to implement payment and corporate protections to their network, we’re free to be free over here.
We don’t have to play ball. not with them anyway,
I think, If we have any credible threat, it’s going to be from the Governmental gross anti-tampering laws, forced moderation, or backup regulations. They could make it legally difficulty for us to exist.
This. I have considerable concern that Fascists will straight up ban Fedi if enough people shift to it. They don’t like not being able to control everything, Fedi is far too much actual freedom of communication.
The thing about fedi is how do u stop it. Ban every instances ip? make it illegal to use? They can try but they will have very little success.
You make laws like the Online Safety Act in the UK. You then attach a multi-million dollar fine to anyone who doesn’t adhere to the bonkers unenforceable stipulations in the text.
All of a sudden, no one but a corporation with a legal department can safely run an instance without putting their money and eventually freedom on the line.
They might not be able to just stop it, but you can force us into a pirate scenario where we have to do it in the dark.
We are likely starting to slowly head into 1984 territory. IF Fascim continues to rise, eventually, non-state-run media will be deemed unlawful and they’ll do what they can to make it go away.
This is why fedi needs to support federation over tor
When they get serious about encryption they will make tor illegal as well.
Tor will not hide you from the feds once they decide they really want to go after encryption. They can either own enough endpoints to find you directly or simply go and shut down all the endpoints. Or, If they have other IP leaks that are unpublished…
On the upside they are firing most of the competent people in government so there’s a chance the CIA can’t do that anymore
If china has failed to stop tor I doubt the us can do much better
since most federation happens over the backend, you could access an instance based outside the usa through tor.
They’d shut down large instances, pressure WordPress to remove support, in the US at least, it could be seen as too risky, if they wanted to they would find a way. I don’t think this would happen easily in the EU though.
Agreed, but at least Bluesky is a public benefit corporation, so it supposed to take in the needs of society as well as profit in its decision-making. That may not be much, but it’s a start.
I’m not familiar with the details of that, but it seems like more of a red herring to me. A form of controlled opposition to divert people away from truly revolutionary platforms.
Of course it has to seem like a plausible alternative, but is it actually decentralized or altruistic enough to make a meaningful difference? I think not.
“Public benefit corporation” is such an oxymoron, I know it’s cliché to say this but it reads like something out of 1984.
If your goal is truly to benefit the public, why wouldn’t you start a non-profit? It’s because they want profits, which will always be at odds with the interests of the public.
Because your non-profit isn’t likely to go anywhere; Capitalists don’t give significant money to non-profits, but they’ll invest in a public benefit corporation because of the potential for profit. The corporation can then take their money and use it for whatever public benefit it intends to work towards. It’s a workaround to try and scrape some benefit to society out of capital, that otherwise wouldn’t exist.
Whether Bluesky is actually a good example of a public benefit corporation or not, I have no idea, I don’t use it.
You’re absolutely right, but as a UxD, until these platforms learn UxD, they’ll never work. They can’t.
It doesn’t matter how great they are, the vast majority of people won’t learn. And they shouldn’t have to. That’s why big commercial apps are better – good designers need to eat, and big companies can pay for their eggs.
It doesn’t matter how good your model is, without great UxD, you’re dead in the water.
Their protocol allows for federated relay servers, but I’m not aware of anyone having done the exercise of launching one.
That’s because, to my understanding, the prerequisite to be able to launch one is “handle the raw, unfiltered firehose of all the traffic on the entire platform”. A relay has to be a mirror of the entire company’s hosting infastructure, and you’d have to essentially do it for free. It’s no puzzle to me why no one’s done it yet.
Ah, yeah that makes sense then. They’re over 30M active users now.
“Public benefit corporation” is a meaningless designation. All it means is they have the option of putting their mission over their shareholders, not that they are obligated to do so.
Chances are it’s really just that, a start. See OpenAI.
Too late - we are already here!:-P
This was literally the photo that finally got me banned from Reddit years ago.
How can anyone not love the guy?
Indirectly, looking up “John Oliver Mastodon” brings up this post in the top few. “John Oliver Pixelfed” has this post as the first option
So we’re not completely left out :)
Exactly, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Someone using BlueSky over Twitter is a good thing.
We still shouldn’t be doing the dirty work of rich people for them.
We should all be promoting Mastodon over the centralized and corporate-owned bluesky.
Talk to John Oliver then.
There are plenty of naive people on here also shilling bluesky over Mastodon.
Over or in addition to? I haven’t seen anyone say BlueSky over Mastodon.
Get your eyes checked.
For fuck’s sake, no need to say ableist shit like that. I’m just saying I haven’t seen it, not that 100% hasn’t happened.
I agree, but I also think we should remember a loss for musk is a win for society
Do you really think Lemmy could handle the amount of people that Reddit has?
As far as I know the existing instances are usually running on capacity and always in need of donations, and that’s when the owner isn’t handling the costs themselves. I’m not sure how well most instances have right now.
Maybe Lemmy would benefit of some way to get people to pay, such as purchasing the ability to give people awards etc. like Reddit. Despite being useless stuff, it might provide some fun that would make hardcore users want to pay. But for that to work out, all apps would also need to show the posts awarded in a different way, so I think that’s unlikely.
But the point is that without a business model, the Fediverse will only be able to handle a limited number of enthusiasts before it faces scaling problems.
yup. no question. Not one instance mind you, but Reddit is also a giant cluster. (and clusterfuck)
We just need the big bois to stop stuffing themselves. There’s 0 reason to have 2/3 of the totally traffic flooding into world because people are scared of Federation that they never even have to deal with.
Maybe we make some premium pay servers with baller architecture, killer response time, user capacity limits and high speed storage?
Eventually, it’s going to be ads, donations or payments. It’s all someone else’s computer, someone has to foot the bill. But at great scale, you should be able to have an ad-free experience for something in the range a dollar or two a month.
I wouldn’t mind having some ads, but I wonder how some more extremists users would react.
But I strongly believe that depending on donations is a very tough place to be, it places the burden of “begging” on the instance owners, which are already doing all the work and should definitely be compensated somehow.
That’s why I donate monthly to my instance :)
A pretty decent sized instance managed will uses a few boxes and some CDN, runs a couple to a few hundred a month, it doesn’t take that many people paying to cover it.
It’s not as bad managing the smaller instances. The app works like it says on the tin until you get really big.
IMO lemmy.world let themselves get WAY bigger than they should have. They had to start doing a hell of a lot more work to keep the thing up.
If you get a good deal on hosting then, on medium-sized instance donations easily cover costs. lemmy.world suggests this can scale up a lot even if you need more complex systems in place to deal with demand.
Isn’t it easier to handle most users on one server than it is to have a bunch of equal servers? Then the problem just moves off the one server towards the communication between the servers being the bottleneck.
The way lemmy (and federation) works, it needs to do a bunch of operations that can’t happen simultaneously, so there’s a job queue. The queue needs to do some database operations and a bunch of communication operations and each of the jobs needs to reach out to distant servers that may or may not be overwhelmed themselves.
You start with one server it costs almost nothing to host. Sooner or later you want to split out the job servers, then you end up needing to split out the database, when you start getting that many people on your server now you want to consider fault tolerance, Even after tuning you can only fit so many simultaneous users on a web server, you end up needing to do some load balancing. The next step would be trying to split it up geography-wise.
That’s scaling up and it’s what big companies do and it’s very expensive but easy for a small team to manage.
Lemmy on the other hand is designed to be scaled out, running smaller individual user bases on lighter hardware with a bunch of individual administrators instead of a organized team.
If people want to be on a large single cluster application Reddit is still there.
I like what we have a lot better.
It costs me less than $10/mo to run mine and some of that is because I have to pay for an email forwarder until my hosting provider lets me start sending emails, part of that is factoring the cost of the domain name. The actual cloud server costs $5/mo right now.
Yeah, you can get away with really cheap operations up until you start blowing through your cdn and communication budget
I’m not too worried about it.
LW definitely can’t handle more traffic than it already has. It already (thanks to the admins’ refusal to update to the latest version of Lemmy, which fixes this issue) takes multiple days for LW content to get federated to other instances properly, which is why I’ve had to switch over to this alt account of mine because there are zero comments on this post in my main instance. With more users, that delay would grow from days to potentially weeks.