rglullis

I might be wrong, but I believe that lemmy-ui default port is 1234, not 1236.

Can you get the the backend to work? If you make a request to <your domain>/api/v3/site, do you get a response?

Not bad, but it would help a lot more if you reached out to him and asked how you could help him. Or, in case he says he is no longer interested/able to work on it, what would be the best way to find someone who can continue developing the project.

we should be inclined to collaboration rather than competition, considering the amount of criticism about western capitalism here.

The ones criticizing are almost never the ones doing anything useful about it.

Most of these niche communities lend itself for community support and discussion around specific problems. There is only so much "news" that can be had around specific topics.

I usually favor bias towards action in these cases: there is nothing bad about just posting questions to a specific community (e.g, Python) and until it starts becoming a problem. When/if people complain about the excessive number of Q&A posts, two things could happen:

• The "I'm here for the news" people are in the majority, and the minority will then go to create an alternative "Q/A" community, like python-help or something.
• The "I'm here for the news" people are in the minority, and they will either unsubscribe or create a separate "news-only" community, like python-planet.

Anyway, I'm all for the idea of using Lemmy for Q/A communities and I'd rather we have people pushing for it than waiting for some "idealized" version.

But we’re missing an instance dedicated to that

There are instances already for:

• Programming
• Software Power Users, Tips and Tricks
• System administration
• VOIP
• Photography
• Hi-Fi Audio
• Car and Motor

What we need is to have people using them and willing to feed it with content.

Reminded me of the living room from Don Draper and Megan on Mad Men.

I think having copies of some content of reddit

Speaking as someone who built a whole service to mirror content from Reddit to Lemmy communities (and got a lot of flak for it), I feel like we already have our share of repost bots and mirroring tools. It seems like a fun project, Reddit's API is "generous" enough to let do this for free and is very quick to see the results. But in all honesty all of Lemmy is starting to feel like just a small crowd of people who have nothing really interesting to say, so all we can do is regurgitate content from Reddit. The dwindling number of active users support this, most of the niche communities are either dead or kept by stubborn people who don't mind talking to themselves.

So, apologies in advance for the negativity and for using your announcement as an excuse for a rant, but: do you think we can think of something better to do to help the ecosystem beyond yet-another repost tool?

Yes, but if you put it a public library you will be opening yourself for all sorts of copyright trolls trying to sue you for file sharing.

Correct, so when I post my song I created to Funkwhale, it’s then federated across the fediverse, living on other servers and able to be downloaded.

AFAIK, the songs do not get distributed across the Fediverse, only the link to the original server.

Someone in the fediverse likes my song and they download it. Who then protects my license and attribution rights beside myself?

How is it different from you hosting your songs on your own website?

How is it different from songs you made available through Bandcamp? Does Bandcamp go chasing people pirating your work and/or using in unlicensed cases (e.g, playing in a commercial setting)?

Monal works fine now.

No, it doesn't. It is still far behind in features compared with Element. It still doesn't have things like reactions, which is pretty much standard in any messaging app.

That you think that Monal is an acceptable alternative makes me believe that your biases are clouding your judgment and make it very difficult to accept your premise about Element being "damned" because of its funding. But let's just agree to disagree, because I don't see how this discussion can go any further.

Again, if "venture funding" is some sort of cheat code, why can't XMPP make use of it? Do you want some moral high ground or some minimally useful product with mass reach?

nominally FOSS

Does it allow copying and redistribution? Yes

Can people fork it in case Element tries anything ridiculous like what happened with Elastic/MongoDB/Redis? Yes.

The thing is FOSS. This is what matters. Enshittification is being thrown around way too easily nowadays

rather about not shitting into your own water supply.

And where is the water provided by the XMPP side? "if you are on iOS, use siskin" is not at all an acceptable answer on 2024. The mobile OS with the largest market share in the USA simply does not have a decent client. What is going to be the next line? "People shouldn't be using iOS anyway, so we shouldn't spend our resources on it?"

Honestly, we are going in circles now. I don't want to get in some type of flamewar over two separate open protocols. It starting to get ridiculous like discussing which branch of the Christian Orthodox Church is the purest one.

I am not trying to distort anything, I just don't agree with your "venture-capital has enabled Element to snatch away the little sustainable funding that exists" premise. I don't see what going after government contracts has to do with "open source funding" and I don't think that "using VC funds to give away free stuff for developers" is something to be held against them just because the XMPP companies are not willing to risk it.

If the XMPP business are thriving in the IoT space, good for them. But to me, as a consumer, this means nothing if they are not willing to compete in the space.

Also, as long as we are talking about Free Software for the end product, I honestly do not care about who is funding it. All I care about is that I can find some way for my parents to talk with me and see their grandkids without depending on Facebook/Google, and if doing it with Element/Matrix is easier than doing with XMPP/siskin, then I'll be using Element. I don't need any of them to pass some arbitrary purity test, I just need them to deliver something minimally usable.