Hey, so it’s not jerboa based and I ended up pushing it back a few weeks, but I’m now looking for beta testers on Android if you’re interested

As for the name, I think I’m going with Luna for several reasons, a big one being that someone suggested it and Flemmy was the only name I could think of beforehand

I’m posting updates to !flemmy@lemmy.world for now, if you’re interested I’ll be posting instructions for the beta soon.

Whether you’re interested or not I’d love to get feedback. I’m good with data and UX flow, but I mostly just comment - I need to learn how other people want to use Lemmy

By convincing people at large that social media run by individuals or groups isn’t viable.

Personally, I’d do it by attacking the credibility of the admins. Sow doubt. “they only run servers so they can steal your data”, “look at this guy! He pretends he cares about free speech, but he’s abusing his power to censor and radicalize people!” “The only reason you’d use these private instances is if you have something to hide. That place is for criminals”

They might even be able to get legislation passed to make it legally risky to run the servers in the US if they control the narrative

Only early adopters, technical people, and the privacy minded care about how this actually works, and we’ve been telling our friends and family how bad Facebook is for years (for good reason). At first they didn’t care, but now I get push back

Next, make it unreliable. If it goes down frequently, gets flooded by bots, or just starts to suck in general, most of the people here now will leave, no matter how important federated social networks are. Maybe they’ll go to servers that bend over backwards to become offshoots of threads, maybe they’ll look for Reddit clones elsewhere, personally I’d start up a private federation for friends and family if this goes south

Regardless, this place will become an empty mall - if it’s not a healthy form of social media I’m not going to spend much time here, and I’m extremely passionate about it

And the last option is just ads and incentives. Make it tempting and play to fomo.

They’ll probably do all of this to some degree, especially if we explode in numbers and present actual competition.

We’re ready to handle it, but we also need to make sure the battle lines are as far away as possible

Convince the population at large it doesn’t work, or even that it’s dangerous.

Like community run utilities, universal healthcare, or any number of things that so obviously work better without a profit motive

Make the populace at large see the fediverse as a failed experiment, a hive of criminal activity, or a bunch of tiny toxic echo chambers

Hell, they could even push legislation that makes running social media out in the open impossible for individuals

I’m totally on board with this. Most of this stuff is random culture crap I could take or leave, but common use of /s is practically an excuse not to make an effort to understand the other person’s POV.

Being a charitable reader and trying to understand the other person is everything.

Sure, without it there will be misunderstandings… But coming back and clarifying “I thought that was obviously sarcastic” is the kind of little nudge that makes both people reread what they wrote, and introspection keeps a community healthy.

It’s embarrassing when you misunderstand someone or if you didn’t get your basic position across - and frankly it should be.

And if people get nasty the second they see a bad take, that’s a symptom of being in an echo chamber (or at least a very polarized community)

I share your priorities, but I don’t think you understand the depth and breath of how they can ruin this for us… The only guarantee is that, at some point (maybe tomorrow, maybe in 5 years), they’ll ask “how can we extract value from this investment?”. That’s what a corporation is, it can’t help it anymore than fire can choose how hot to burn

But even before then, we have misaligned goals. At best, their priority is to generate an endless stream of advertiser friendly content, extract information about users, and grow endlessly. At worst, they want to use us to help kill Twitter while ensuring federation of individuals does not become a viable model for social media

That’s certainly what the companies believe, is it actually true though? Musk said everyone but the bots came crawling back… Without showing numbers

I think tech CEOs badly want to believe this is true, because it would be an easy solution to all their problems. And with everyone doing something similar, there’s no competitor for them to jump to

I think they’re about to realize no one has to go to them, entry were just the convenient choice. Once they’re no longer convenient, people will turn elsewhere

That’s certainly what the companies believe, is it actually true though? Musk said everyone but the bots came crawling back… Without showing numbers

I think tech CEOs badly want to believe this is true, because it would be an easy solution to all their problems. And with everyone doing something similar, there’s no competitor for them to jump to

I think they’re about to realize no one has to go to them, entry were just the convenient choice. Once they’re no longer convenient, people will turn elsewhere

That’s funny, I did the opposite - I got used to developing on osx, then Linux, but that was always on my work computer - my desktop has always been Windows (I’m still using the same license and chassis from the computer I bought in high school a decade and a half ago).

Then I burnt out hard, and started picking up contracts here and there, but didn’t have the money to pick up a second computer powerful enough for gaming or work. So I ran virtualbox and avoided cmd like the plague for a while… It was driving me nuts, so I made plans to run Linux with Windows in a hypervisor - I was looking at pci passthrough so I could give it direct access to the graphics card.

But then wsl came out and it just didn’t seem as important. Even as Linux gaming has grown, I just haven’t felt the need to switch… It’s sometimes finicky and setting everything up on a new computer is a pain, but the only time I considered switching one of my machines over is setting up LLMs - that was a real pain to coax into working, and it’d run better on Linux

I made 2 posts on Reddit, one was a meme about my friend jumping over me to see my username, the other was some random text post. Thousands of comments though

It’s just not in my nature… So much so that I’m trying to release a Lemmy app tonight, and I just remembered I haven’t started on the ability to post…

Everything else came easy to me - you should be able to click on anything, everything should stay where you left it… But I have no idea how people want to post. I should probably just do it now before I overthink it

Here’s the other thing - he’s maybe a millionaire, not a billionaire. That’s middle class, maybe upper middle class if he’s got other income

This is a normal person who just lost his job with little notice because of a greedy company, and, to add insult to injury, now has to come up with money for refunds out of the blue

I know I wouldn’t feel good taking back that money, whether he can afford it or not

I think it’s more just because we’re early adopters and the first wave of refugees.

We’re building something here - and right now, for some it’s a new home, for some of us this is something big - a place that resists monetization. This isn’t just the fresh new version of social media, built by cool people who have the best intentions and a vision (I think most of them did, at least initially)

Admins go bad, already some of the instances I’m on have people starting to look at not just paying for servers, but making a profit. And if they can live off the donations - fine, more power to them.

But when someone comes knocking with a bag of money, what are they going to do? They can sell us out, but they can’t go far before we leave… What do we miss out on? The content will either follow or we’re missing out on content elsewhere.

And we can mitigate it further - too many talented people care too much to let this idea die. We’re going to face difficult times, but it’s a new ephemeral Internet built on top of the one stolen from us - it doesn’t start or end with a reddit clone.

And I think that’s why we care - because this time is different. It can’t go bad the way everything else does. It relies on no one, and it’s built from all of us

This place is ours. No kings, no masters, no capitol, no capital

Yeah, people will do something just for fun, to profit personally, or to spite someone

The moment they realize someone is making money off it, they start getting FOMO - humans are very loss adverse. No one wants to miss out on free money

But what if they had turned around and said, “fine, we’ll start hiring you guys. You’ll get paid hourly, but you’ll have to do the proper paperwork, be given guidelines from corporate, reviewed on your performance regularly, and you might be relocated to undermoderated subs”?

Most of them wouldn’t be into it - they don’t actually want to work for Reddit, they just don’t like feeling like someone else is sitting back and living off their work while they get nothing. The reality is, they’re not doing a job, and they generally don’t want to be (there’s a difference between a job and work, especially work that benefits others vs a job protecting the cash cow)

When someone does a service for you, you act grateful and offer them lemonade and gift cards, you don’t try to turn it into a job, and you sure as hell don’t break their tools and ask when they’ll get back to work

I’m considering a free version on the app stores with limited ads(subtle and no tracking), a paid version without them, and one with optional donations on alternative stores.

I don’t like ads and I don’t want to shove them down unwilling throats, but most people don’t care (and frankly I need the money)

Among the ones that do, there’s those that hate seeing them, and ones with privacy concerns. If I make them subtle and offer an upgrade to remove them, I hope that’ll satisfy one group, and the other one can get a build where the ad libraries were never installed in the first place

On the plus side, I’m about to open the beta that handles both just fine (plus a lot of features no one else is doing yet). The deadline I for myself is Saturday when the Reddit clients go down.

Unfortunately it was built by someone who lurks and comments, and I realized even though merging feeds from accounts on different servers is going to be awesome, other people like to post and I need to stop getting off track

The stress of the timeline is starting to get to me and I’m terrified no one is going to give it a chance, but I’ve fixed most of the things that drove me nuts in jerboa… That should count for something, right?