SirEDCaLot

So what?
There's a place for that. Back in the old IRC days there was a place for AOL. Let TikTok and Reddit keep the idiots.

I think that number is way too high.
The developers of Lemmy are doing it for free- unlike those of Reddit etc.
That means you just need the server resources to host the instance.
Now if you're hosting hundreds of thousands of users, then sure it may get expensive. But the whole point is you have a few thousand here, a few thousand there, and thus the load gets greatly distributed.
Instead of 50 servers costing $1000+/mo, you have 500 servers costing $100/mo (or whatever).
And the $1000/mo server can collect enough in donations or simple ad banners to cover their costs.

What you're missing isn't costs, it's profits. The little guys, and the big guys, all want to make a lot of money. They don't want to cover their costs, they want to cover the mortgage on the beach house. Little companies often don't make enough profit to do that, so they sell to the big guys who will slash costs and service and go profit-focused.

But start to run things with the goal of providing the service rather than the goal of making money and things change drastically. For most of its life, Reddit was ran with the goal of providing the service, which is why it grew so fast. Then a few years ago it shifted to the goal of making money and that's when things went downhill- because they didn't have a clue how to actually monetize the service so they pushed the 'typical buttons' (aka sell out the users) and of course the users are now pissed off.

But get rid of software dev costs, and look at just the hosting cost, and the number is MUCH lower.

There's also the fact that we don't need to host 52MM users. There aren't going to be 52MM users on Lemmy anytime soon.

Windows users will want to check out BlueIris

Otherwise, Synology has a great surveillance package, but you only get 2 cameras licenses with your NAS and more licenses are like $50 each

Hello from lemmy.fmhy.ml !

LazaroFilm slaps SirEDCaLot around a bit with a large trout

I love it! I remember that...

The tech stuff was a bit of a filter, true. There will always be a place for services like AOL was back then- the super easy to use 'dumbed down' platform for those who don't want to learn. I think the result of 'Rexxit' may be that- the smart folks come to Lemmy and the dumb ones stay put. Not sure if that's good or bad.

By dumb ones I don't mean people who lack technical knowledge, I mean people who need the answer spoon fed to them. Because I think we should be realistic. Compare Matrix to WhatsApp, compare Lemmy to Reddit, the biggest 'filter' is having to choose a home server when signing up and then not having all the content sprayed at you automatically. If that is what we call 'difficult' then I argue our standards as a society are too low.

And I think in the old internet culture there was plenty of space for different levels of skill. The people with technical skill were the ones setting up little servers on their cable modems with spare laptops, The people without technical skill were the ones just using them and learning. Nothing wrong with that I don't think. Big platforms make both groups equal, anybody can spin up a discord server or start a subreddit, but at the expense of everybody's control. If the experienced user and the inexperienced user both want things running differently, they don't get that choice because it's not under their control.

A lot of the value isn't technical, it's social. Each instance can set their own rules for acceptable conduct and what sort of content they want or don't want. That's one of the most valuable parts of decentralization, an instance like Beehaw can try to be an open and inclusive space and thus have a longer list of rules, while another instance can be more permissive and allow NSFW and more offensive speech. And thus the two can coexist in the same network with the same namespace.

100% agree. I think we were better off with the Wild West. Users were actually in charge, server admins were small operators who didn't have to answer to venture capitalists who wanted to 10x their investment, not everything was data scraped and logged to build advertising profiles on the entire population. Each community set its own rules, you didn't have one guy in California deciding what the AUP would be for millions and then changing it on a whim because some advertiser got pissed off.

While the big companies have created some very cool stuff, and using it is very approachable without any technical knowledge, I would trade it all in to go back to the situation where not everything is hosted on some megaplatform. I think it's better for the internet that way.

I like to think that sort of movement is making a resurgence, I'm seeing more people involved in self-hosting stuff, and with recent changes at Reddit and Twitter there's a lot more interest in decentralized communication platforms.

I also think the platform is the key. I don't think any one person or group should be in charge of the public square. Not Spez not Elon and certainly not Tencent or anyone connected with an authoritarian government.

I think the beauty of decentralization is that in many ways monetization doesn't have to be necessary. Or it can be necessary on a much smaller scale. A big company like Twitter or Reddit or Facebook needs to make money on a massive scale. A small company, like somebody running a big Lemmy instance, doesn't need to answer to investors who expect a 10x return. They just have to cover their costs and maybe make a buck. So we go back to the old days like when we had independent forums, half of them were just free as a labor of love, the other half had a banner ad or two and maybe some way to support the site by donating. I think we were better off that way.

Me too. I think it's not missing the platform or the protocol, it's the attitude that went with it. It was a time of experimentation, people would spin up websites and services and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't but it was ours. People would forward a port to a spare laptop and make a shitty server for IRC or shoutcast or video game or something like that and it all belong to us, there were no huge platforms in charge. Each community could set their own rules and not have to worry about what an advertiser was okay with. And there weren't big platforms scraping every last keystroke further monetize us.

It was a lot less accessible for people not willing to learn technical skill, but I think in many ways we were better off. There was a lot more freedom and more independence.

You don't have to sell me on the merits of diversity. I agree diversity is important.

I want to rectify those historical issues. But doing that in college admissions is too late. It's like being on a crashing airplane, and sticking gum on the altimeter to stop it from spinning down. It doesn't fix the real problem. And the real problem is the cycle of poverty that grips former red-line neighborhoods. And that cycle persists continually because whenever someone gets enough money to afford it they leave the neighborhood so it stays a slum forever.
Fixing that will cost billions. It will need education, job training, family support, social services, drug rehab, and JOBS so the people have some light at the end of the tunnel. If you're gonna tell a 18yo gang member to hang up his illegal Glock and bust ass in school so he can get a job at Burger King, he's gonna say fuck that imma keep slinging dope and if I'm dead by 30 at least I ain't broke.

I call it racist because if you let Harvard dictate a race admissions profile like we want at least 50% minority students, then you necessarily have to let a racist college dictate a race admissions profile like we want at least 97% white students. And if you let colleges favor black people but not white people, that's literally the definition of racist law (law that favors one race over another).

Racism has done terrible things to our nation. More racism is not the right answer to fix it.

It's a lot easier when the site doesn't obfuscate the code.

Reddit will survive. I hope it does- we (Lemmy) need it to.

Fact is, not every Reddit user is a good fit for Lemmy / is someone we want to bring over to Lemmy. Reddit has been intentionally courting a demographic that just wants quick content scrolling, like TikTok. I think that's a big part of why Reddit has gotten so much more hostile in the last few years- such people don't generally have open minds.

I want to migrate the people who are respectful, open-minded, who want a discussion and a debate. I don't want to migrate the people who just want to endlessly scroll through shiny videos and never produce an intelligent thought.

So I say let Reddit have those people- if Spez can monetize them, do it with my compliments. The site/company won't be nearly as valuable, but who cares.