rglullis

• It qualifies as activity. People are posting when it matters to them.

• It still is unrelated to the point. The point is that you keep betting on donation-based instances because you want them to succeed, yet history is (repeatedly) showing it to you that these bets are not good.

• The flair part does not federate.
• They send fake (non-existing) actor ids for votes to obfuscate the identity of the real user. It is "compliant", but completely against the spirit of a public social network.
• Every proposal that I've seen from them had ActivityPub as an afterthought. Creating "Feed" as a type of Actor, using a special formatted type of message to share ip addresses of abusers for "spam mitigation" even before considering a simple usage of the Flag activity, etc.

I am not saying they have bad intentions. I am just saying that they prefer to develop things that work for them first and for the rest of the Fediverse second.

And healthy.community and viewfinder.pro are getting activity from other people who are just focused on doing their thing. What does this have to do with the overall point?

Piefed is the flagship instance of the project. I can understand why he would want to have communities there, but don't tell me that this is not a push for decentralization. It is not.

Your statement only makes logical sense if you stipulate that the only donation-based instances are part of "the platform".

How the future of feddit will be?

I don't know what it will be, but I hope that it becomes less about "instances" and servers and it becomes more a proper web of independent applications that share the social graph.

Piefed also has this Mastodon-esque tendency to implement features that only work on their system and are not interoperable with the rest of the ActivityPub software. Which is the kind of thing that is only "nice" until they are a minority player, but could make them one of the most hated systems if they start getting significant users.

If the reason not to create a community on instance X is because instance X may someday disappear

That is not the reason, you are getting it backwards.

I am saying that smaller instances will be more likely to disappear if we force them to be destination of communities. If we leave them be only for users, the strain on them will be smaller and the likelihood of them crashing or the admin burning out is smaller.

Most people don’t pay for services on the Internet

Yeah, but we are not "most people". I thought "we" understood if you are not paying for the product, then you are the product. I thought "we" understood that "Free software" was not a "free lunch".

And if basic talk and text service was freely provided by volunteers, they’d milk those volunteer organizations dry, too.

This is also why I think we should flip the script and stop cheering admins that run "free" instances. We should stop helping admins who can not make rent and we should start telling them to start valuing their work and demand proper compensation.

Is the backing of FHF that significant? Do they have resources for hiring professional admins in case Ruud or Stux decide to say "screw it, I'm out"?

If it does, then why does Stux need to go around panhandling to make rent?

It’s too big to be a hobby, and too small to be a job.

Facebook allegedly extracts $14/month of value from each of their US-based users, ~$12/european user, $7/month for Latin America and $4 from Southeast Asia.

If each active user contributed $1/month for their instance and $1/month for the developer of the software they use, the Mastodon developers would have an operational budget of ~$800k per month, the Lemmy developers would have $50k/month.

I don't think that the problem is we're "too small to be a job". I think that the problem is that the average "enthusiast" is an hypocrite. They will profess their hatred of the business practices of Big Tech, but they will look for any and every possible justification to excuse themselves to contributing to the pool.

We have tens of thousands of people who (...) are mostly interested in consuming, not fighting for attention.

Sure, but what I don't get is this: why is that people are absolutely fine with paying 10-20€/month (or $50-$70/month in the US) for their mobile phone service but expect that the server hosting service and software development service to fall from the sky?

You brought hypothetical scenarios. I was just pointing out a fact: the second largest Lemmy instance is going under and taking with it all the communities that were created there.