An overdue blog post about the finances and other news from the .world
I'm actually surprised how low the server costs are. Granted, the userbase is not that large, but it makes me optimistic that Lemmy.world survives long-time.
Lemmy long time
Lemmy forever for a 1000 years
Lemmy and rust all the time always for 1000’s of years
Lemmy Foundation
Would have expected the asset hosting to be higher, given the number of images (both the original + the resized thumbnails etc)
Legendary. Didn't realize the Lemmy world team was also running Mastodon and Firefish instances. Much love for your determined support!
Don't forget our discord server!
If anybody would like a facebook group, feel free to let us know. We've also considered a friendly Minecraft server. Maybe a TikTok account.
Official subreddit? Loljk
Lemmy world only fans when? Post hot foss pics
I support this idea
The amount of videos of feet scripting terraform is gonna be caaraaazzyyyy
Non profit foundation is awesome to see. It will probably the general structure of all significant long lasting institutions on the Fedi.
I might be out of the loop so I'm genuinely curious - what's wrong with Cloudflare?
The post mentions several times that it isn't popular and that an alternative will be found.
It's the fear of centralization, I believe (correct me if I'm wrong!).
Seeing that the whole point of federation is to decentralize the web, putting everything under the Cloudflare umbrella goes against this philosophy.
The federation philosophy is not going to hold up when users centralize themselves on an instance, requiring that instance to seek out things like Cloudflare just to bare the weight.
Maybe it's about Cloudflare becoming a single point of failure for large parts of the internet?
Y'all are wonderful. Thanks for your dedicated effort.
I also appreciated your shout-out to other instances that are active cooperating with .world to make Lemmy a better place. Teamwork makes the dream work.
The idea of a non-profit holding sounds great, but what about collateral damage if shit really hit the fan? Would it not be smarter to have a separate entity for each platform? They could all have essentially the same statutes, boards, directors etc. etc., so in case if one really got under heavy fire, the others wouldn't be affected? I know it means more admin work and probably also requires some governing policies with regards to the funding distribution, but might be cleaner in the end.
This is absolutely the correct thing to do. Do not place all your eggs in one legal basket.
Won't that be an administrative nightmare though? N times the number of income tax declarations etc?
Cheers for the numbers, always good to see transparency for income and expenses
I wonder why Mastodon.world has done so comparatively poorly. I also wonder if Mastodon could be more integrated with Lemmy would that improve things. As awful as twitter is these days, the way it embeds so easily into other content, which lets you click straight to its comments is invaluable. No doubt its on Elon's list of things to ruin, and he'll get around to it eventually.
mastodon.social dominates for one simple reason. The Mastodon gGmbH app now defaults to mastodon.social sign ups.
Selecting instances was confusing the shit out of people, so they relented and simplified the signup process.
What is gGmbH?
The gGmbH is a non-profit company with limited liability under German law. In German this is gemeinnützige Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung – gGmbH for short. Here 'non-profit' (gemeinnützig) means that the purpose of the company is to benefit the common good.
Neat! I was wondering.
That's unfortunate.
Instead of requiring an insurance selection or defaulting to one specific instance, perhaps they could have a handful of moderate/large instances that the app randomly selects between when a user signs up. That would spread out the signups from people who don't understand the instances.
Yes, that's the plan. But determining which instances are suitable isn't easy.. I'll ask them what's the status on this.
I also wonder if Mastodon could be more integrated with Lemmy would that improve things.
This won't happen. The Lemmy dev does not want Mastodon to be integrated into Lemmy. They say that plenty of other fediverse software already has this implemented, and that Lemmy doesn't need to reinvent what other software does.
The Lemmy dev does not want Mastodon to be integrated into Lemmy.
Something tells me this isn't the last word on the issue. If the fediverse concept is to succeed, then its two (current) largest players need to have some cross-functionality.
Perhaps the fediverse will get big enough that third-party developers will step in to fix this. Twitter & Reddit both benefitted hugely from the extra functionality third-party developers enhanced both platforms with.
Its anathema to the whole concept of the fediverse that one person - a lemmy dev - gets to decide something so important.
Something tells me this isn’t the last word on the issue. If the fediverse concept is to succeed, then its two (current) largest players need to have some cross-functionality.
I strongly disagree here. They might be using the same protocol, but the user expectations are something completely different. I've tried mastodon and really don't get the appeal, just like I never understood why people want something like Twitter. And I'm sure there are some Mastodon users out there who can't be bothered about Lemmy.
Forcing them into one common framework feels like alienating both to me.
Its anathema to the whole concept of the fediverse that one person - a lemmy dev - gets to decide something so important.
I am unsure if their political views have any affect on being the ones wanting to decide on important things like that. I know that they are both openly communist, and they both have Fidel Castro as their profile picture.
Perhaps the fediverse will get big enough that third-party developers will step in to fix this.
Unless they can convince the devs to integrate, I believe the third-party developers would have to fork the project and convince Lemmy instances to switch to their fork. From there, the third-party developers might change the name from Lemmy to something else.
I keep coming back to imagining if Reddit and Twitter were integrated. It just sounds like a giant mess. I guess I'm just not sure what the benefit would be, or why anyone would want it. What's the actual use case that makes it desirable?
The existing integration works suprisingly well given the different use cases. Bettet than Masto and Peertube.
Unfortunately Mastodon not supporting group actors is the main difficulty in the integration on its end. Lemmy has hacks like auto-boosting thread posts, but kbin and peertube don't so you can't get thread posts without following the post author.
I think allowing user following (allow subscribing to user pages) and handling tags (which I'm not sure the right approach, probably can fit in whatever multicommunity feature gets developed) are the only missing things on the Lemmy side.
If you want that you can check out Kbin. It's like Lemmy but also has a microblogging section that relatively flawlessly integrates mastodon content.
+1 for kbin (which I am commenting from). I initially chose kbin because I liked the UI more than Lemmy's, but I've come to really appreciate the fact that it supports microblogging as well.
What did mastodon.world do poorly?
He meant it did poorly as in is less popular than the lemmy instance
Ah OK. Yeah lemmy had a big growth past months. Mastodons growth is mostly absorbed by .social
@Lugh@lwadmin
> I also wonder if Mastodon could be more integrated with Lemmy
They're already quite integrated, in the sense that users can interact between both platforms. What further integration did you have in mind?
Maybe I'm missing something, when I try to interact with Mastodon from futurology.today there's zero ability to interact. It seems to give the option to send DMs, but when I test it, they never arrive.
i’m thrilled to see that the donations are letting this be somewhat self sustaining. obviously a lot of unpaid volunteering going into this so not quite a self sustaining non profit, but it’s got all the promising signs
Thank you for all the work you guys do! Glad to see server expenses are coming in under budget of the donations!
Great work! Although I'm far too busy with other stuff I'd love to be able to contribute some Terraform when and where I can. Maybe you could put some stuff in a public repo so we might contribute?
The stuff in our repo is quite sensitive, so probably won't ever be public. If your interested in helping. Feel free to fill out a application. It's in the side bar on the home page. 😎
Alright I will. Just didn't want to commit to it and then ending up having zero time.
In my experience usually your sensitive stuff should be hidden in secrets so public repos usually shouldn't be too much of a hassle.
We do that as well for CICD.
Love it! I’m happy to keep supporting this endeavor and community.
So from one sysadmin to another great job! Keep it up and I can’t wait to see where this goes! 🍻
Keep up the good work!
Out of curiosity, why is Cloudflare so heavily despised? It sounds like the service works well?
Mods? That's great! It's going to be totally different this time!
Don't suppose there's any news about when the bug that doesn't let some of us upload images will be fixed, is there?
It’s not a bug, it has been disabled on purpose temporarily.
It would have been nice to know that.
There were several pinned posts when it happened.
Not about that particular aspect. I read them.
I didn't read them and I still knew.
Well excuse me for not being as smart as you.
Never said I was smart. I just paid attention a little bit.
The point being made is the fact that you not knowing is on you, not on anyone else.
No need to choose to be offended by that.
Except they literally made a post about it.
I remember seeing a post about it. Maybe you missed it.
I guess. I looked at the pinned posts regularly to see if there was an explanation and didn't see one.
It’s related to the CSAM stuff that happened a bit ago. Most of the instances purged and disabled the Pictrs database until a better solution can be determined. The general thought process is to use an external site for now
Which makes sense. Image serving and threaded text serving probably shouldn't run in the same service. They have completely different storage and caching requirements. Also, they have rather different legal risks for server operators; and thus different moderation requirements.
For example, there are images that it's illegal to possess in the US or Western Europe (CSAM) but there's not a lot of text that's illegal to possess — national security secrets / classified information, yes, but that hasn't been a problem here.
I'm actually surprised how low the server costs are. Granted, the userbase is not that large, but it makes me optimistic that Lemmy.world survives long-time.
Lemmy long time
Lemmy forever for a 1000 years
Lemmy and rust all the time always for 1000’s of years
Lemmy Foundation
Would have expected the asset hosting to be higher, given the number of images (both the original + the resized thumbnails etc)
Legendary. Didn't realize the Lemmy world team was also running Mastodon and Firefish instances. Much love for your determined support!
Don't forget our discord server!
If anybody would like a facebook group, feel free to let us know. We've also considered a friendly Minecraft server. Maybe a TikTok account.
Official subreddit? Loljk
Lemmy world only fans when? Post hot foss pics
I support this idea
The amount of videos of feet scripting terraform is gonna be caaraaazzyyyy
I think you guys should join Bebo.
What's the link?
https://discord.gg/lemmyworld
They sweat a lot
read this as "they swear a lot". both may fit
I know for me at least there's a direct correlation between sweating and swearing
Non profit foundation is awesome to see. It will probably the general structure of all significant long lasting institutions on the Fedi.
I might be out of the loop so I'm genuinely curious - what's wrong with Cloudflare?
The post mentions several times that it isn't popular and that an alternative will be found.
It's the fear of centralization, I believe (correct me if I'm wrong!).
Seeing that the whole point of federation is to decentralize the web, putting everything under the Cloudflare umbrella goes against this philosophy.
The federation philosophy is not going to hold up when users centralize themselves on an instance, requiring that instance to seek out things like Cloudflare just to bare the weight.
Maybe it's about Cloudflare becoming a single point of failure for large parts of the internet?
Yep.
And yep again.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=GEbn3nHyKnA
https://piped.video/watch?v=DDe-S3uef2w
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Iirc it can break federation
I'm loving the transparency around here. 👍
Y'all are wonderful. Thanks for your dedicated effort.
I also appreciated your shout-out to other instances that are active cooperating with .world to make Lemmy a better place. Teamwork makes the dream work.
The idea of a non-profit holding sounds great, but what about collateral damage if shit really hit the fan? Would it not be smarter to have a separate entity for each platform? They could all have essentially the same statutes, boards, directors etc. etc., so in case if one really got under heavy fire, the others wouldn't be affected? I know it means more admin work and probably also requires some governing policies with regards to the funding distribution, but might be cleaner in the end.
This is absolutely the correct thing to do. Do not place all your eggs in one legal basket.
Won't that be an administrative nightmare though? N times the number of income tax declarations etc?
Cheers for the numbers, always good to see transparency for income and expenses
I wonder why Mastodon.world has done so comparatively poorly. I also wonder if Mastodon could be more integrated with Lemmy would that improve things. As awful as twitter is these days, the way it embeds so easily into other content, which lets you click straight to its comments is invaluable. No doubt its on Elon's list of things to ruin, and he'll get around to it eventually.
mastodon.social dominates for one simple reason. The Mastodon gGmbH app now defaults to mastodon.social sign ups.
Selecting instances was confusing the shit out of people, so they relented and simplified the signup process.
Neat! I was wondering.
That's unfortunate.
Instead of requiring an insurance selection or defaulting to one specific instance, perhaps they could have a handful of moderate/large instances that the app randomly selects between when a user signs up. That would spread out the signups from people who don't understand the instances.
Yes, that's the plan. But determining which instances are suitable isn't easy.. I'll ask them what's the status on this.
This won't happen. The Lemmy dev does not want Mastodon to be integrated into Lemmy. They say that plenty of other fediverse software already has this implemented, and that Lemmy doesn't need to reinvent what other software does.
Something tells me this isn't the last word on the issue. If the fediverse concept is to succeed, then its two (current) largest players need to have some cross-functionality.
Perhaps the fediverse will get big enough that third-party developers will step in to fix this. Twitter & Reddit both benefitted hugely from the extra functionality third-party developers enhanced both platforms with.
Its anathema to the whole concept of the fediverse that one person - a lemmy dev - gets to decide something so important.
I strongly disagree here. They might be using the same protocol, but the user expectations are something completely different. I've tried mastodon and really don't get the appeal, just like I never understood why people want something like Twitter. And I'm sure there are some Mastodon users out there who can't be bothered about Lemmy.
Forcing them into one common framework feels like alienating both to me.
I should have clarified that it's 2 devs, Nutomic & Dessalines.
I am unsure if their political views have any affect on being the ones wanting to decide on important things like that. I know that they are both openly communist, and they both have Fidel Castro as their profile picture.
Unless they can convince the devs to integrate, I believe the third-party developers would have to fork the project and convince Lemmy instances to switch to their fork. From there, the third-party developers might change the name from Lemmy to something else.
I keep coming back to imagining if Reddit and Twitter were integrated. It just sounds like a giant mess. I guess I'm just not sure what the benefit would be, or why anyone would want it. What's the actual use case that makes it desirable?
The existing integration works suprisingly well given the different use cases. Bettet than Masto and Peertube.
Unfortunately Mastodon not supporting group actors is the main difficulty in the integration on its end. Lemmy has hacks like auto-boosting thread posts, but kbin and peertube don't so you can't get thread posts without following the post author.
I think allowing user following (allow subscribing to user pages) and handling tags (which I'm not sure the right approach, probably can fit in whatever multicommunity feature gets developed) are the only missing things on the Lemmy side.
If you want that you can check out Kbin. It's like Lemmy but also has a microblogging section that relatively flawlessly integrates mastodon content.
+1 for kbin (which I am commenting from). I initially chose kbin because I liked the UI more than Lemmy's, but I've come to really appreciate the fact that it supports microblogging as well.
What did mastodon.world do poorly?
He meant it did poorly as in is less popular than the lemmy instance
Ah OK. Yeah lemmy had a big growth past months. Mastodons growth is mostly absorbed by .social
@Lugh @lwadmin
> I also wonder if Mastodon could be more integrated with Lemmy
They're already quite integrated, in the sense that users can interact between both platforms. What further integration did you have in mind?
Maybe I'm missing something, when I try to interact with Mastodon from futurology.today there's zero ability to interact. It seems to give the option to send DMs, but when I test it, they never arrive.
i’m thrilled to see that the donations are letting this be somewhat self sustaining. obviously a lot of unpaid volunteering going into this so not quite a self sustaining non profit, but it’s got all the promising signs
Thank you for all the work you guys do! Glad to see server expenses are coming in under budget of the donations!
Great work! Although I'm far too busy with other stuff I'd love to be able to contribute some Terraform when and where I can. Maybe you could put some stuff in a public repo so we might contribute?
The stuff in our repo is quite sensitive, so probably won't ever be public. If your interested in helping. Feel free to fill out a application. It's in the side bar on the home page. 😎
Alright I will. Just didn't want to commit to it and then ending up having zero time.
In my experience usually your sensitive stuff should be hidden in secrets so public repos usually shouldn't be too much of a hassle.
We do that as well for CICD.
Love it! I’m happy to keep supporting this endeavor and community.
So from one sysadmin to another great job! Keep it up and I can’t wait to see where this goes! 🍻
Keep up the good work!
Out of curiosity, why is Cloudflare so heavily despised? It sounds like the service works well?
https://0xacab.org/dCF/deCloudflare/-/blob/master/readme/en.md
Quite interesting to read! UP LEMMY!
You're making great progress.
Mods? That's great! It's going to be totally different this time!
Don't suppose there's any news about when the bug that doesn't let some of us upload images will be fixed, is there?
It’s not a bug, it has been disabled on purpose temporarily.
It would have been nice to know that.
There were several pinned posts when it happened.
Not about that particular aspect. I read them.
I didn't read them and I still knew.
Well excuse me for not being as smart as you.
Never said I was smart. I just paid attention a little bit.
The point being made is the fact that you not knowing is on you, not on anyone else.
No need to choose to be offended by that.
Except they literally made a post about it.
I remember seeing a post about it. Maybe you missed it.
I guess. I looked at the pinned posts regularly to see if there was an explanation and didn't see one.
It’s related to the CSAM stuff that happened a bit ago. Most of the instances purged and disabled the Pictrs database until a better solution can be determined. The general thought process is to use an external site for now
Which makes sense. Image serving and threaded text serving probably shouldn't run in the same service. They have completely different storage and caching requirements. Also, they have rather different legal risks for server operators; and thus different moderation requirements.
For example, there are images that it's illegal to possess in the US or Western Europe (CSAM) but there's not a lot of text that's illegal to possess — national security secrets / classified information, yes, but that hasn't been a problem here.