The 'Follow Packs' are just a web directory. That's totally different.
I have no idea what dansup is working on there, but it seems destined to be another plate he's not going to focus on keeping spinning.
Gargon's team is probably going to end up building something that's off spec and idiosyncratic to Mastodon, basically guaranteeing that there are totally unrelated implementations across the fediverse.
it’d basically solve the issue of duplicate communities too
There's no "issue" with duplicate communities. There's an issue with Reddit users wanting there to be a single canonical home for a topic on a local-first distributed network of websites.
This isn't Reddit. This isn't like Reddit. It doesn't operate like Reddit. It just kinda looks like Reddit. And maybe it shouldn't, because it anchors people's expectations and prevents them from embracing something truly new and different.
That's a pity.
Down the road, I'd be willing to contribute to a hosting fund, or even shoulder the costs of a small VPS, but I'm probably 5 or 6 months away from being able to do so. And I'm not a sysadmin, so I couldn't help there. But I believe in the fediverse as a network of more focused, community-first websites, rather than the "jump on one of the 3 big, generalist servers" model. This space was doing that.
I would love to see it attempted again.
Moderating federated sites like these is a lot more work than people expect. Some of us have experience from the old internet, like forums, or even chatrooms, and these spaces are much more difficult than even large examples of those were.
If anyone on your Mastodon-based site follows some bad actors elsewhere, you get a flood of questionable-at-best material streaming in that you have to deal with. You have to moderate both your local community, and the rest of the internet, and that's... Ugh. And then, when you actually do it, you get your users complaining about "censorship" or "petty admin drama", when you just don't want to host and platform bullshit that's against your rules (or worse).
It's exhausting. I'm not surprised most people in the position collapse and disappear.
Oof. Yeah, ok, if the VPS account owner's MIA, then... Damn. What about the domain? Does that also belong to the VPS holder?
Lemmy instances are interconnected to a certain degree
And? This is treated as the only selling point of the technology, and is a significant part of the confusion. Lemmy isn't a place you can go to on the Internet. Having to go into a 10 minute long explanation of ActivityPub doesn't help sell the social web. Not that people using it would be able to; most fediverse users still don't seem to know even the basics of how it works. People still ask about logging into different instances with the same credentials.
Wordpress instances are not.
Some of them are. Not that that's the point.
Lemmy is something you use to create a social content aggregation website. It also happens to network with other, similar websites. But we want to treat them as access points some imagined whole, which A) they are not, and B) raises this problem of choice paralysis around which server to use, because they're discussed and treated as dumb terminals, rather than websites.
I'm not sure what order you read my reply in, but it wasn't linear, was it?
How much funding is required to keep the hamster alive, and is there a chance of putting together a new admin team?
Reddit is a website. Twitter is a website. Bluesky is a wrbsite.
Lemmy and Mastodon are not websites. They are webserver platforms. They're like WordPress or Joomla. Imagine trying to treat "WordPress" like a singular place on the Internet.
People keep trying to sell technology to people who are looking for a location, and it's fucking imfuriating.
You need to consider units! 1m ≠1m³
Social Networking Sites: Full of fascists actively trying to recruit people into fascism
Social Media Sites: Full of videos and memes pushing fascism
Governments Around the World: Increasingly giving into or controlled by naked fascists
You: "Have you considered financial literacy?"
What the fuck, dude?
I'm continually surprised by how incurious people are in general. One of the first things I did when I explored Lemmy was click on the weird "+" button next to post titles, because I wanted to know what it did. And then I checked the settings to see what I could tweak.
People don't seem to do shit like this, and it baffles me.