When is a large instance too large?
The bigger threat to ActivityPub right now is the admin’s credit card or legal liability due to hosted content. The most successful open source projects either become or attract commercial projects. IMO, the hobbiest operators will be the downfall of ActivityPub. The hobbiest operators are subject to life happening. I would love to see the number of Fediverse instances that have blinked in and out of existence.
I see, you want this thread to be an echo chamber? Got it.
The niavity in this debate is not realizing that most successful open source projects need both commercial sponsor and operators. When the current admin of lemm.ee decides that he’s done, or has financial troubles then this community goes away.
The problem in this debate is between open source and open choice. Open source purist are often anti choice. If you want to use a closed source, proprietary system, that is your choice. The key aspect of federation isn’t the open source (its great) but the open choice – you can choose your own server (I have my own, FWIW) or some random tech bro or some evil Corp marketeer, or Meta, the point is choice. For each user, there are compelling arguments and compelling reasons for why someone would choose Lemmy or Threads or whatever, the value is in the choice.
So in the demand for our SABDFL to make a choice, we are in effect saying that we want to restrict the choice. Why do we care if there is a great community on Meta or that a great. Community on our server is attracting a broader community? Walled gardens are walled gardens. So I have to ask, what walled garden is the community asking for: open source and closed community? Sound like hell to me.
Take an upvote, but I think the situation I’d very different from the XMPP and the office standards or even kerberos. In each of those cases, it was a standard.
For the XMPP case, XMPP use for Google was primary business users. The XMPP case ignores the rise of other, more convient, more engaged communication like Facebook Messenger, discord and free text messaging. For the open standard of OOXML, Microsoft’s aim was to sell Office. And for Kerberos, the AD changed were driven by business reasons. Regular kerberos is insane to admin, and Microsoft made it easy; it doesnt help that Novell’s eDitectiry failed.
With Federation, the story is different. The engagement isn’t like XMPP of connecting to people you know, or the security reasons of AD or even the standards of OOXML. In a sense, Federation is more like DNS or a web server: it’s just about connecting communities.
The embrace/extend/extinguish arguments are all FUD arguments. Arguments 2 and 3 boil down to Threads effectively walling off their side, which would more or less mean de-federation. And what happens when your now free Lemmy instances starts requiring you to pay $8/month? Or what if some of the larger instances decide to commercialize and sell data? FUD is not a compelling argument: the same arguments were made about Microsoft and their open source embrace. And there are plenty of FUD arguments to make against Lemmy.
I would argue that federation with commercial entities will make for a better Fediverse. Sure Meta is subjectively Evil, but it’s motives are clearer than some random dude’s Lemmy instances. And by Federation there is ability to get high quality news, science and technology information. In less than a day, major players joined and were posting to Threads.
The email analogy is a false dichotomy. The reason behind the large email providers is because the cost of the running and maintaining an email server is cheaper than running your own. But you could run a trusted email service if you set up your DNS records correctly.
Hard disagree. I want to interact with the grandma’s and family that aren’t tech savvy. The Fediverse promise is one where the user has the power. I don’t see how Meta will change that. All I see is that the Oklahoma asshole who wants to debate will get ads and I won’t. Commerical sponsors of the Fediverse is validation of the idea, so let it happen. Yes, Meta will see my username and will try to make ads happen, but thats not what Meta needs or wants: they need high quality content and will accept that some of it they can’t monetize. But if they can monetize those users in their corner, then they see value.
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I mean, to be fair, how many real people can post 600 times a day?
My better half is convinced that my job is looking at and interacting with black windows. She can’t figure out why I need high end computers when all I did is fiddle with the black windows.
+1 to the no porn rule. I seriously considered hosting my own instance, but balked at the liability especially in regards to porn. I’m no prude, but having adult material seems like a serious headache.
Yeah, but paying $300 for one is crazy for the average home user. If I am spending company dollars, then sure, there is a reason to go for the brand name. But for my home setup I want something between cheap and crazy expensive.