I’m fairly new and don’t 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?
Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.
Because there will always be rebels running small to medium size instances based off of donations. It was the very first thing to happen at the birth of the internet, and will continue to happen today. Will there be a few major instances that eat up the majority of the fedi? Yeah, probably, but the design of the fedi is that the experience of decentralized social media will stay the same regardless of what’s going on with instances of the network.
Let’s just hope it doesn’t go the way of email, it started the same way: federated service controlled by no one. Nowadays big corporations influence banlists to enforce a protection racket and non-compliant instances are both banned and filled with spambots.
I’ll be honest with you, I would rather have the ban lists than not. No server is required to use them, and the amount of spam and fraud they filter out is enormous. If someone gets on an IP blocklist because they either can’t or don’t know how to secure their system, then no one should trust anything from them. Having a way to identify them before they cause a problem is enormously helpful.
There is already a project underway to identify federated servers that just spew spam, and I am all for it.
Okay you do have a point. The thing is they get abused for email where it’s pretty much a racket. I just really hope Lemmy doesn’t end up the same way, since if some bad faith powerful actor starts having control over a list then they get to dictate which servers can federate and which ones not, which is pretty much a walled garden.
I do get the need to identify malicious instances preemptively though, spambots are a threat wherever we go and some instances are just insufferable like exploding heads.
While correct in that email is definately now limited to a small number of major corporations, the core function has not been monitized. In other words, because I have a Gmail account, I am not limited to Gmail apps nor do they inject advertisement into them. I can live with that.
But is hosting your own mail server and using it for work/finances/everyday life still an option? I don’t think so, at least not without workarounds because sooner or later you will have to send/receive to/from big email.
I looked into it not too long ago. It’s basically a standard spam protection to block any emails from a private server. Sure Google doesn’t own Email, but any Ody with a Gmail account won’t even get your email in their spam filter, it won’t even make it that far.
As someone who works with small businesses, most of whom run their own internal email server, I completely disagree. Yes, it does take some knowledge of DMARC, DKIM, SPF, and DNS, but any well-managed server would have those set up properly anyway. GMail has no issue accepting email from a correctly set up server.
AOL servers, on the other hand, are a massive PITA.
Good to know.
We are already cut off from big tech social networks, who cares if it were to happen again? It can only make us grow bigger than we are now.