How do you follow someone you discovered while browsing a foreign instance?

You’re already free to support developers and instance owners financially if they’ve set up either Patreon, OpenCollective or LiberaPay 🤷

Problem is, not enough people are doing it. Case in point: https://join-lemmy.org/donate

Turns out you’re actually the owner of your home instance. I didn’t know that when I made my previous comments.

I’m guessing you’re currently paying for your instance’s upkeep out of pocket? I can’t spot any donation links on your instance. This might work for you personally, but do you really expect other, larger instances to do the same? Even donations are only rarely sustainable.

How do you expect your instance to cover its costs, then?

So how is your home instance financially sustaining itself? Surely you’re helping it, right?

B-b-but the Fediverse told me that XMPP was embrace-extend-extinguished by Google!!?!

So every negative news about Twitter, Instagram and literally every non-fedi social media platform is “relevant” too?

The post itself doesn’t even make an effort to connect this to potential benefits for fedi.

My problem is what others described: downvoting without actionable feedback.

This is exactly why I prefer instances that have downvotes disabled.

Some instances choose to disable downvotes. If you downvote a comment that originates from one of those instances, it will have no effect outside of your home instance.

There will never be enough donations to cover the cost of hosting videos.

☝️ This user has never donated to libre software.

It’s already illegal if your content is large enough to be copyrightable.

The issue is that the majority of people on the Fediverse are “techies” with specific interests, which skews the spectrum of content quite a bit.

The Fediverse is in an awkward spot. It needs more people like you to keep technology communities from becoming Linux circlejerks, but at the same time those circlejerks are driving people like you out.

Do you think comments like these are swaying public opinion in your favor?

People will never use downvotes the intended way. They haven’t done so on Reddit either.

I see no productive use for downvotes, so I’ve disabled them.

But what if some of my comments include information that can uniquely identify me?

That can be something like “message me on Matrix at …”

I didn’t see your initial proposal. However I sympathise with this post and I really understand the frustration you’re feeling with the lack of donations, having seen it time and time again in the open-source space.

I was going to pledge that I’d donate once I had the cash available, but seeing how you respond to people in the comments is leading me to reconsider. You may not be demanding donations, but to me it does look like you’re attempting to shame people into donating with a challenging tone. Quoting one of your responses:

Anyway, now you know it as well. If you think that this is a worthy effort, what are you going to do about it besides commenting here?

I still want to support you if you’re going to pursue this, since I myself have a strong interest in Lemmy being GDPR-compliant, but I ask you that you please reconsider how you approach the people that can potentially be supporters of your efforts.

Can you show where the GDPR excludes public information? Because if it doesn’t and can uniquely identify a person, then it’s still subject to this regulation.

IANAL, but fediverse instances need to find a way to automatically set up data processing agreements when initializing federation to be GDPR-compliant: https://gdpr.eu/what-is-data-processing-agreement/

Multiple people on here have already tried to tell them.