The Fediverse is a specific thing. And even if it were just referring to any federated social network, it’s very questionable whether Bluesky really can have independent instances.

Because this is not c/maybefederatedsocialnetworks, it’s c/fediverse, which is a specific thing.

That just a function of it being a long-term and established community. And likely a bit of agreement with your broad cultural and political views. Right now Reddit is more likely to have information on a random video game than Lemmy, but that doesn’t mean their structure is inherently good for producing information.

A federated system where you federate with everyone without limit is a good way to get a lot of bad shit, but that’s not how the Fediverse actually works. Instances defederate from other instances that are dragging down the quality of their social network. Most importantly, if your admins go bad and decide they want to not pursue truth but instead craft a narrative, you can move instances to one that has the standards you want while only losing the content that was actually on the now-bad instance.

Read on to literally the next paragraph, which says Diaspora is the only still developed platform that matches the original definition and does not use ActivityPub, or to the section that explicitly calls ATProto a Fediverse alternative.

The first paragraph is descriptive of the Fediverse, not a test for whether something is part of it. The Internet is a collection of computers communicating via TCP/IP. That doesn’t mean any two computers communicating over TCP/IP are now part of the Internet.

That’s present in any user editable platform. Wikipedia’s consensus doesn’t mean it’s actually representing broad universal truth. That why everything gets cited and the talk and history pages are public to the readers, so they can judge the reliability themselves. If you stumble on a less visited page, that consensus group gets smaller and smaller and the likelihood of it being essentially a pretty fiefdom increases.

Even printed encyclopedias had no such claim. If someone is putting out a instance that’s too highly biased to be useful, defederate.

Neither this community’s sidebar nor Wikipedia agree with your definition.

ATProto is not the Fediverse. Is there something in this blog you think should be discussed in the context of the Fediverse?

It depends on if the shortfall in rent is coming from something server related. If stux is pulling a good salary for his hosting work and the shortfall just came from a different job falling through, that’s a fine time to ask for donations, but not something people would feel warrants shutting down the server rather than taking out a loan.

I’m fine having the burden spread unevenly. I don’t mind donating more so that a free platform is available to anyone who wants to use it. Whether something is funded by donations or fees is separate from whether the cost of people’s time should be included in the revenue target.

I assume he’s applying donations to the server costs first, then considers extra as profit/salary. We should be considering developer time as a core part of server costs, but I think people would react poorly if server donations went to personal expenses before server expenses.

I think one of the best thing hosts could do is be transparent about costs and how much time maintenance takes and what sort of effective wage they are getting.

“Public benefit corporation” is a meaningless designation. All it means is they have the option of putting their mission over their shareholders, not that they are obligated to do so.

I think you’d need a little more than that to make sure the restriction isn’t used defensively by harassers (one of the reasons people ask for this is to show others bad behavior in their replies). But it does feel like a solvable problem.

And Mastodon having more active moderation (since you can proactively look for an instance that meets your moderation expectations) also means the stuff that can’t be handled mechanically can be managed.

lemmy.xxx

Risky click.

Edit: It’s unregistered. Which I view as a total failure of the Lemmy community.

I’ve definitely seen some boomer friends jump from Facebook to Bluesky after the hard right turn. I think there could be the potential to capture the lost causes as corporate social networks contort themselves into more explicit vessels for rightwing ideology.

I still don’t like facebook. Even without the other stuff, I’m just not the type to document and share my life.

…

It’s there to solve a very real problem, that nobody is asking to fix.

“I’m not the type to comment and review books, and the people I do know who do that are old, so BookWyrm is solving a problem nobody asked to fix.”

Maybe there are people, younger and more ideologically devoted to non-corporate services than your mom, who do like to share their lives with a limited set of friends and would like a service without all the evil stuff.

That communities can be moderated either through voting or moderation is no excuse to spam them because you’re too lazy to make a DM. How your instance wants to handle DMing is a whole separate matter.

If you want to share something with someone, share it with them. Tagging them instead of sharing the content in a normal way spams the whole Lemmy discussion with irrelevant comments.

I really don’t see how Cory’s view of enshittification doesn’t also encompass the powerful corporation embracing, extending, and extinguishing their own protocol to close any escape hatch. Especially when the key module is so monolithic and expensive.

They’ll make a proprietary update to their relay that conveniently makes it better and faster for their users while making it harder and more expensive for the alternative to keep up. They’ll add a special feature, but only build it out for their implementation and not figure out how to backport it to the public spec. Little by little Bluesky and the spec will drift. All while the alternative keeps burning money trying for something that, while Bluesky is still in the growth mode, provides no benefit. Eventually they give up or just can no longer be a real alternative, then the VC investors start asking for more and more and more. Corporate money isn’t just going to roll over and say “you got us, I guess our investments were just charity”.

I’m in the US and was specifically drawn toward European instance because my (admittedly very lightly informed) understanding is Europe just has better laws on internet freedoms. IIRC a US-based Mastodon instance (Mastodon maybe?) was seized by cops at one point for pretty questionable reasons. Our legal system gives far too much power to police and corporations to enact spurious searches and punishment.

I don’t trust it because there’s no believable plan to make it commercially viable, so it’s just going to end up defunct or enshittified. Mastodon is up front, it’s a volunteer service that you can either pay for or roll the dice on the instance staying up. And there’s a built-in way to move on when one goes down.

BlueSky is a B-corp, which theoretically means they can say their mission takes priority if sued by an investor in court, but doesn’t in any way require them to make it the primary goal, and the reality of funding and money and investors means that’s almost certainly not going to happen.