rglullis

I am interested in system administration

Yeah, right...

What upsets me in this whole thing is that you present an impossible dilemma: if I run the instance, you won't participate because you think it is associated with the money-making business. If I say "okay, then you go find an instance that is topic specific and and only for groups", you find any possible reason to balk.

So here we are: you want to have someone that can focus on instance administration and you want to focus on building communities, but God forbid you even consider doing it a way that is only tangentially connected to a commercial venture. That is the part I don't understand.

lemdro.id also has communities like "Microsoft" and "ChatGPT". "Linux" is only tangentially related to programming.

wouldn’t it also be nice if you volunteered some of your time to keep your communities and instances active

They are not "my" communities. I started the topic-specific instances as a way to help the general ecosystem and to have a destination for the alien.top posts. I was hoping that would help bootstrap more usage outside of the larger instances. I may post from time to time when I find anything interesting, but I do not hold any pretense to keep all 15+ instances and 200+ communities fresh with content all the time.

As stated above, I’m as interested as sysadmining than you are in community building

I am interested in the community building, I am just not committing to do it for hundreds of them on top of the work of running the instances and on top of developing tools in the ecosystem.

Were you talking with anyone in Europe, by any chance?

Geographical distance between Europe and Australia

Only because aussie.zone is relying exclusive on waiting the data to be pushed. If they pulled the data in bulk, latency would not be an issue and the problem would be immediately solved.

topic-based instances hosting the following communities

Aside from mander.xyz, the other instances are not topic-specific. They have communities which are focused of a more general scope, and its users are not focused on conversations around an exclusive topic.

Anyhow, the point is: as of yet, there is no one running an instance focused on Fediverse news and discussion. Wouldn't it be nice if you, I don't know, volunteered to do so?

Ah, sorry, I wasn’t complete above: I meant a diverse set of mods and admins

I am sure you can find people to help you co-admin the instance as well, if you set one up.

The only instance having delays is LW.

It's not a problem with LW but aussie.zone taking too long to respond to the data being pushed. There are instances on the US that fixed this by taking initiative and setting up a system that would active pull the data from LW to keep in sync.

Why would I?

Because you are the most invested in getting people out of LW, and because you don't trust other people that set up topic-based instances?

diverse set of mods with good track record.

Why wouldn't this be possible in a separate instance? Is the motivation to volunteer to mod in a community attached to the instance where it's hosted?

I prefer to have a community where aussie.zone doesn’t have a 3 days delay

Yeah, a community on a topic-specific instances would never cause that, because it would only be a small number of activities.

Who manages that instance?

You. You can go to elest.io and create your own instance.

If you worry about costs, I'll be sure to contribute with a few cents per month. ;)

How do you prevent power tripping?

How do you prevent power tripping in the community you want to move to?

All this shuffling around for circumstantial reasons gets tiring and confusing.

Instead of spending all this time and energy trying to coordinate large-scale movements it would be a lot easier to just create a separate instance to be the home of the communities and have a neutral ground.

Have you tried running any of the alternatives for more than a few hundred users?

Mastodon is bad for small and single-user instances because it wasn't designed to serve so few people. Once it starts growing beyond a certain level of activity, most of your overhead is on sidekiq/redis side of things.

I've seen the Pleroma devs openly saying that their service can not handle more than 20k users, because they rely on the database to build the timeline and they don't have a strong caching system.

So yeah, there are a bunch of tradeoffs and Mastodon is not trying to optimize for anything in particular. But once it reaches a certain size the operational cost (per user) does go down.

Mimic what paid online news does

I could easily write an essay connecting the rise of populism and the fall of civic society to our loss of real journalism, and another 1000-word post arguing that paywalls are just a bad band-aid trying to cover the deep wound caused by eyeball chasing "infotainment".

These "fake" paywalls are just an attempt from the news publishers to have both ways and make revenue both from the paying customers and the ones that may be okay with ads.

Also, if the admin deserves compensation for their time, why don’t I get a pretty penny for this?

People love to hate the Brave browser, but their system pays 70% of the revenues to the end user. If you manage to convince more people to use it, it would be perfect. End users would get some $ from accepting the ads and they could kick some of that back to the sites they wish to support. The whole economy could grow and everyone would have their incentives aligned.

You know what the problem is? People were looking at the 2-5 bucks of crypto tokens that they would get and instead of using them to stimulate the economy they would just hang on them for the speculation of profit. Individual greed and penny-pinching turned one of the most viable alternatives into another tool for crypto grifters.

My mention of drugs/booze/cigarettes is completely non-judgemental. I am not saying that is bad if people spend money on that. I am just pointing out that, yes,.some people do spend money on it and they are not expecting to keep partaking in their pleasures for free.

Reddit is having trouble monetizing

They do not. They are making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue with their advertising.

We have no tools against capitalism.

Trade and commerce that prioritizes small business is already a big weapon against globalism and Corporatist Capitalism.

Focusing on closed-loop, sustainable economies is a tool against Capitalism.

Community-led investing that prioritizes long-term wealth building is a tool against rent-seeking enterprises that stimulate zero-sum games.

You are definitely underestimating the number of broke people here.

If I am, then the discussion should be "how can we have a sustainable system that gives a fair wage to those working on it , while not stressing those who can not afford even 2 bucks per month?" instead of this "you can not charge from everyone because you are not empathizing."

Once we reframe the discussion, we should be able to propose things like:

• "pay it forward" systems, where those who can afford more pay for those who can not. Let them become responsible for who to invite. (I have implemented this at Communick, by the way, and so far I had only two people paying for others.)

• Selling ad space for ethical businesses. Back in 2007 there used to be a network of bloggers who did not want to pollute their pages with adSense, so they got together and created a system where companies would pay $5k to $10k to have one slot and all bloggers committed to display this banner during the whole month. Something like that could be done here as well, if "making money" wasn't such a capital sin.

• focus on making this normie-friendly. Stop with the political bickering and organize the topic-specific instances (which I already offered for other admins), use them to attract a larger audience so that we have more "actually I can pay a few bucks per month" crowd to dilute the "I am anti-establishment but I can not afford to fight against it" crowd that seems to dominate so far.

The latter.

You of all people here should know that the cost of running the service is not the real issue. Even if Mastodon takes 3x as much hardware to run as Lemmy, the cost of hardware is still pennies per user.