"Underserved niche" in the sense that the site outpaces almost all other servers by monthly activity despite going out of its way to contain its own growth.
It's not just their problem. Even if every instance carefully load-balanced users with each other so that all instance were the same size and nobody was too big, there would still be a problem securing funding as the fediverse as a whole gets bigger.
Donations alone on the biggest instances aren't enough to keep the lights on, spreading out those users across other instances won't make more money suddenly materialize, in fact it might make money disappear faster, as smaller instances have a higher cost-per-user due to insufficient economies of scale.
Well, ultimately mastodon/lemmy are hobbyist projects. They would naturally count as “provided as is, with no guarantees”.
I don't know about Lemmy, but Mastodon the software project is most certainly not a hobbyist project, blowing it off as one is just tone deaf. It's a real non-profit company with actual developers on an actual payroll. mastodon.social and .online are real expenses on the balance sheet of that non-profit. pawoo.net was started by pixiv, a for-profit company, but changed ownership several times and is now owned by Sujitech LLC (along with mstdn.jp and mastodon.cloud). The owner of misskey.io is also in the process of forming a company.
Yes, they are "provided as is, with no guarantees" but the people who run them are completely and sincerely invested in their sustainability as more than just hobby projects.
Show the problem exists which you try to solve. Point to instances who struggle financially, who consider running ads, something like that.
Not to mention that over the years there have been a lot of instances that have gotten into a variety of precarious situations that could have been avoided or alleviated if they had a lot more money.
- mastodon.technology shutdown because the admin ran out of bandwidth (family member was dying)
- mastodon.lol shutdown because the admin ran out of patience (some kind of nauseating fedi admin drama)
- switter shutdown because it didn't have the legal means to comply with new online safety regulations that were being passed
- ownership of pawoo.net changed hands, twice! the first 2 owners figured it wasn't sustainable financially to keep it online.
The lack of an ability to prevent someone from doing something to you, without compromises on your part, is not the same thing as being okay with it being done to you.
3rd party services can access the posts, because the authors marked them as publicly accessible.
Those same 3rd party services can also index the posts in a search engine, but this is only because there is no feasible technological barrier to prevent them from doing so. If such an imaginary technology did exist, it would have been deployed already.
In the mean time, we can only count on a social solution, which is to merely signal our objections to search engine indexing, in the hope that maybe a law could be drafted that uses that as precedent to make indexing without consent illegal.
Here's a question for you. Do you think it's okay for Google or whoever to install invisible cameras everywhere in public spaces, that were explicitly for the purpose of collecting data to develop a facial recognition model to search people without their consent? Public space is public space ...
You're conflating tagging a post as public so that it is publicly accessible as being the same thing as consenting to being indexed in a search engine.
Matrix tackled this UX issue in the bud relatively early with https://matrix.to/. It still isn't ideal, but much better than expecting users to install browser extensions or OS-specific hacks to properly handle ActivityPub links.
PaperWM really should be its own DE. It's so good, almost perfect, but held back by its nature of merely being a GNOME extension.
This list seems curated, there are some huge servers missing, so the author probably decided to include whatever they thought was notable to them.
It depends on the software. Some proxy all content from remote servers so you only connect to your home server (Mastodon). Others don't, instead they make clients load remote content themselves (Lemmy). If you use browser client you can see all the connections being made.
petunia
joined 1 year ago
Nope. If the site was about knitting I would have said the same thing.