In order to be truly independent from platforms like Reddit, communities need to be owned by their members in ways that platforms cannot take away.

Is this a fucking joke

I didn’t post it because her joke was funny lol

Since she was being sarcastic it means that she is trying to say that Obama wasn't bad (because that's how sarcasm works).

I mean… no? Sarcasm works in multiple ways lol. This is like a children’s picture book-level of understanding of sarcasm.

Obama’s biggest controversy was the mustard

That's not what she said lol. Sorry as a neurodivergent person I get that this tweet might be hard to read possibly, but she's being sarcastic here. Maybe in poor taste, but it's a joke. She's well-aware of the shit Obama's done and isn't a fan of him.

Yeah mine act like I get shot every time I walk out my front door

Enterprise starts at 20k a year before traffic

My Mastodon server has just under 1.5k MAUs and has raised $4k so far this year. We've only been open for six months. This is not hard money to raise.

I live in Chicago lmao. I take the red line regularly. I go allllllllllllllll around the city and have never once had a problem here. The only reason why you hear about crime or shootings as much as you do in the news is 1) because it's already been sensationalized, and that sets the pattern, and 2) the entire Chicagoland area (including the suburbs, which get news stories blown up too) has a population of about 11.5 million people. Statistically for even a murder rate as low as Chicago's is (and it's not even in the top 20 most violent cities in the country), shit's just going to happen.

This is so weird to me lol, maybe I'm just odd but it's so weird seeing McCarthyism still rearing it's ugly head after what... 5 decades? I am by no means an ML (can't stand them as an anarchist) but this is wildly blowing out of proportion what @dessalines@lemmy.ml has said and done.

I mean like why link a 'Socialist FAQ' that's literally just a ton of links to education on socialism and the different schools of thought it has? Not all communists are tankies (not even most) lol. Just generally shows a lack of familiarity with actual leftists / anticapitalists.

I mean you're more than free to start contributing to Lemmy and / or offer to be on the core team. You can fork it and start your own version of it not owned by them. The nice thing about having a communist (or at least an anticapitalist) developing it instead of a capitalist is that you have the freedom to do that. You cannot do that with Twitter, or with Reddit, or with Facebook, or with Instagram.

Capitalists will not voluntarily do that because it is unprofitable to them. Companies that do end up floundering or dead.

Idk to me there's a very real difference between the two and I'd rather have a tankie developing a platform than someone like Elon Musk making it go to shit.

One of the easiest things to do is honestly just to learn how to use something like VoiceOver and fix stuff that feels broken. Broke my wrist a while back and had to rely on Talon Voice for getting around my computer cause I couldn't type, was a huuuuuuge eye opener and made it much easier to write accessible software lol.

Girl calm down, please just take a step back. Maybe read up on communism or communists / the far left before blaring off takes like this. I'm not an ML and not a fan of them as an anarchist, but this is suchhhhh an overreaction to what they actually said.

Additionally if you don't like the dev team, then fork it. Or volunteer to be on the core team. Submit some PRs. Start your own alternative. One of the cool things about having anticapitalists develop software is that it is open and you can do that. It actively does the opposite of what capitalism wants us to do. I think just that fact alone should make you pause and maybe reassess the language you're using (Hitler and other fascists rose to power actively aided and funded by capitalists because it helped retain their power).

Users actually run a lot of larger instances on the Fediverse off of donations! I run a larger Mastodon server and we get literally double our monthly costs in donations. For every month we stay open, that is two months longer we stay open. Absolutely wild. We have about 1.5k users, with about 20-30 of them donating maybe $5-10 monthly. That's 2%-ish of the user base donating. Lemmy is LEAGUES easier to host given that it's written in Rust and is incredibly resource efficient. So I can only imagine it'll be even cheaper to host on donations.

There’s a great example right in the quoted article regarding Reddit’s iOS app, for example - the upvote/downvote buttons there need to be labelled with alt text.

Good lord I didn't realize how bad the app was. This is like... basic stuff I feel like lol.

but they can write malware and commit it to their repos.

Why would they do that lmao

True. This should get better over time though! There's not a lot of optimistic UI in Remmy and that causes the app to feel a lot slower. There's a lot of PRs up rn to improve the frontend so maybe something will make it in soon!

Please stop spamming this in the thread, it's annoying af.

Sometimes people just like spreading drama. Other times they just have weird or different beliefs. Accusing someone of having ulterior motives isn't useful or helpful unless you can demonstrate that this person isn't just having an internet debate that they feel strongly about.

EDIT: Also important to note, I feel like this is gonna be a slow, slow process. We really have no idea when sign-ups will settle and could be looking at months or days of Reddit hemorrhaging users.

THIS THIS THIS. A lot of folks call the migration to Mastodon from Twitter a 'failure' because Mastodon didn't immediately jump to 100 million monthly active users lol. There was a spike, but a lot of folks went back to Twitter. But we now see more spikes every week or so when some stupid shit happens on Twitter, and with every spike, more and more people stick around. We get about 2000 new users an hour on Mastodon across all servers. Now at 12 million MAUs, up from wayyyyyy less than that earlier last year. Growing slowly is the key, a migration won't be instant.

Really begging folks not to take this kind of approach to having this conversation on Lemmy. We had literally this exact kind of discourse on Mastodon and it has severely impacted the public perception of Mastodon, to the point where there are tons of people that think it's full of 'NIMBYs' who are super strict and expect you to behave a certain way.

People have a very very hard time understanding that software like Lemmy or Mastodon isn't a community or a platform, but a network of individual communities that everyone has a different view into. A lot of my friends were burned joining Mastodon because they interacted with a bunch of boring white people who weren't funny, and it's hard for me to explain to them that you need to join a different instance and follow different people lol. Also people don't understand instances or the fact that instances are run by volunteers.

When I started my Mastodon server (right before the big Twitter 'migration' lol) I loved what I found on Mastodon. The community was amazing. But this exact specific reaction (down to the stuff about refugees) ended up poisoning that community and the folks who potentially wanted to join it.

I'm still new to Lemmy, but I think it's important to approach this with an open mind. Communities grow and change over time, and I think we should be more open to that and lead with empathy. And I understand the frustration with this is VERY real (trust me as an admin I MORE than get it). But I think a lot of what we're getting from Reddit is very positive, not the negatives, due to the fact that we have more moderation control here and because it's mostly the cooler users lol.> Yeah we already went through this exact thing with Masto and Twitter. The complaining about defed is particularly annoying to me, like… defederation is a feature of the fediverse, not a bug, lol… Hopefully the “this doesn’t work exactly like MyFavoriteSite” folks will clear out eventually like the last wave.

Also to be fair I don't think that that means this becomes a neoliberal shithole, but I think the majority of folks joining mean well and like the vibe. They're joining because of the vibe.

This is what's so hard to convey about the Fediverse lol. Mastodon is obviously not everybody's cup of tea, but when I made my account it was kinda shocking to me how I communicated with actual people. No ads in the feed. Took time to find good content but it was there.

Where do they do this? Do you have links? So far what I've seen is they comment on posts that go viral on their instances, as they're allowed to do. I can't say I've had any problems with Hexbear users.

It impacts as long as those problematic instances are federated

How? Like in what way?

Okay, what I'm saying is a vast majority of the time people just say stupid shit online. And that's it. This is a good way to say it, not 'what does this person have to gain by doing the thing that internet users have done for forever to earn imaginary internet points? Are they trying to destroy Lemmy?'

I think people really overestimate how much stuff like this costs relative to how much users are willing to spend. My 1.5k user Mastodon instance costs roughly $100/mo for managed hosting. I set up a donation portal on OpenCollective and got fiscally hosted by the Open Collective Foundation (giving us 501(c)(3) status).

Overnight we got one-time donations covering more than six to eight months of our hosting costs. Our monthly donations are double our hosting costs. And we've gotten donations from private charity funds and are eligible for grants. This is all from less than 1% of our user base paying us just a little bit, usually <$10.

Lemmy is infinitely more efficient to host than Mastodon, and I'm sure some Elixir-based alternative will come along and make it cheaper to host too. The fact that Patreon is as successful as it is right now and that creators can make a living off of it shows that this model is self-sustaining and that you don't need advertisements or to profit.

It can’t last. Right now, lemmy/ActivityPub is in the “early adopter” stage of the tech hype cycle.

Folks have been saying this about Mastodon for years and it's only grown. Facebook's now looking at investing in ActivityPub. It's a W3C standard for federation on the internet and the amount of apps supporting it is only growing.

I think probably the most bleak thing that could happen is that maybe Lemmy has a smaller user base and only a small amount of people convert over from Reddit. But even then I'm kinda happy with that. I like what I'm doing on here and I like the community so far. And I could deal with a smaller set of communities that are ad-free, have a pretty great experience, etc. etc.

I realized now just how much I sounded like some kind of Lemmy early adopter supremacist in this thread, for that I apologize. I didn’t mean to be a dick.

God I love this about the Fediverse lol. On Twitter or Reddit you don't get actual human interactions like this.

I don’t think “greed” is quite the right word. “Greed” would be the right word if they were trying to make themselves more profitable.

I mean regardless of whether it's greed or not it's happening because they need to generate a profit period lol.

“Why do investors invest so many hundred of billions of dollars into companies that cannot be profitable without becoming super-shitty? And why do users join them knowing that they’re going to become super-shitty one day?”

David Harvey has been ringing the bell on this for at least a decade lol. Effectively capitalism runs out of profitable investments when you need continued YoY growth. Like finding trillions of new investment opportunities a year is just not realistic. So capitalists fund bullshit projects and flow their money into markets where the perceived value is significantly greater than any of the actual socially necessary value. And that distance grows greater over time, until people realize 'what the fuck are we funding' (like what happened with crypto, or the metaverse), and then that gap immediately shrinks and the unlucky capitalists lose their money. And that will continue happening.

It's insane because the dev has only been working on this for three weeks. And it's the best progressive web app I've ever seen. Almost feels native on my iPhone other than the lack of haptic feedback.

To expand on this, it’s not just capitalism - it’s greed.

No it's just capitalism lol. Every company has to continue reaping in profits for capitalists or else it dies. This is just Reddit's way of doing that.