Which part of "I am not asking for financial support" is not clear from the blog post?
rglullis
joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
Stop thinking in terms of prices, and start thinking in terms of value. A three-letter domain for less than 1000€ is a bargain.
To be precise, I'm willing to give up some ownership. I still want to participate in its governance.
someone else’s hardware?
If a new consortium is formed and if the collective decision is to move it, yes. If the decision is to keep as it is, also fine.
Just coordinate the release of the urls and the transfer of the instance.
This is exactly what I am offering. I want to transfer these instances to a consortium to own this collectively.
without putting any work or money into it.
Just yesterday I renewed 10 of these domains. That cost me ~400€. I renewed nba.space and nfl.community last month, each cost ~650€. Running all these instances is costing me ~200€/month.
I'm not even looking to dump these costs on the potential new co-owners, this is why I said that I don't mind keep running them.
It seems like you are waiting for the next influx to potentially monetize
First, we'd have to argue the implication. You are implying that any attempt at building anything that is financially sustainable is immoral, something that I said many times is completely misguided, and a point of view that is starting now to be shared by other prominent figures in the Fediverse.
Second, I am offering the instances to be co-owned precisely to assuage those concerns. By having other admins co-owning the instances, I'd hope that less people would be pushing those accusations against me.
aren’t going to join communities if they can’t register there.
Why?! The whole point of federation is to let people join communities even when they don't have an account in the same server.
the most active communities start off with a few people who care almost obsessively about that topic.
There are two different, orthogonal issues here:
- people that are looking for a community in a niche interest, do not find it, and go back to Reddit.
- people that are in a big instance and create (or sometimes, recreate) a community for a popular topic. This happens quite often and not because they were not satisfied with the existing communities, but just because they could not find them.
The idea of having topic-specific instances is an attempt to mitigate issue #2.
People will leave or join based on how the admins and mods run them, whether or not the users are hosted there.
Not my experience. A few examples:
- No one complained about the mods from !linux@lemmy.ml, yet I've witnessed endless discussions about moving away from lemmy.ml.
- Beehaw defederated from LW, so this forced users of these instances to "choose" between the communities and/or create accounts on both of them if they wanted to keep following the whole conversation.
- Personally, I do not want to join or participate extensively in communities that are on LW if we have a topic-specific instance for it. I know that I am not the only one.
That's an argument that is:
- application specific
- agency-removing (only Lemmy devs can do something about)
- orthogonal to the stated problem
It's amazing, there is always someone that will look at other people are doing and find the worst possible take.
I decided to reach out to other admins precisely because I got tired of hearing "you are running all these instances by yourself, who guarantees that you are not going to do something nasty with them or disappear if you lose interest?", even though I'm running all these instances by myself, keeping them up to date, posting regularly on a good number of them, trying to get more people involved for over an year and (most importantly) outliving a bunch of "community-based instances" .
Seriously, this crab mentality is the worst. What a disgrace.
"rendezvous instances" is a perfect term for them...
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I am not planning to close any instances. I am not working on them based on their current activity, but I am keeping them for a scenario where a mass migration away from Reddit actually happens.
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When I say admins only, that can be extended to moderators as well.
At least I don’t think we should discourage creating different places for the same topics
I'm not discouraging it. To repeat: the idea is not to push a "there can be only one" mentality, but to set up a system that can work well for the 80% of people who can be satisfied with the median case.
I don't mean universal in the sense of "totalitarian", I mean it in the sense of "large common denominator".
Do you think that the conversation around, e.g, python programming or wood turning techniques will vary so much that it warrants many specific flavors?
it’s likely to be skewed towards whatever culture exists in western english-speaking countries
This is good enough for most people and does not hinder the ability of those that are in the minority to create a different/specialized community.
Centralization/decentralization is a spectrum. No one is proposing to force everyone into a single box. The idea is only to combine efforts for the things that exist in common and to avoid unnecessary redundancies.
There are plenty of ways where people can enter into an equity agreement without having to pay directly with money.
Are you trying to get rid of me? Then why are you arguing as if (a) something bad might happen to me or (b) I am somehow unable/unfit to manage this?
No matter what I do/offer/propose, you will always try to find an excuse to rationalize your unwillingness to contribute to what I am doing, like I'm failing some type of BS purity test.