rglullis

Now I am confused, are you able to make changes to the Lemmy codebase? A fork? If you want to find a way to fund development, why not just work with the current team?

As a concept, it could be a valid approach. But you need to put actual numbers to see if things make sense:

• What would be the monthly membership fee?
• What would be a reasonable SLA? If there is an outage on a Friday night, are the members okay if they wait until Monday to get it back someone online?
• What do you think is a good hour rate to pay for an admin?
• What should you pay for someone to stay on call?
• Can I run bots? How many? Does each bot count as a separate account?

I think you'll see that as soon as you start asking people to put money and to feel like they "own" it, the demands will increase and so will the costs.

For reference, the one coop I am somewhat familiar is from Mastodon: cosocial.ca. Each member pays CA$50/year for an account. I think this is particularly too expensive. There are other cheaper "commercial" alternatives that charge less:

• omg.lol offers mastodon and some other services, for $20/year
• mastodon.green offers accounts at $2/month
• Communick offers Mastodon/Lemmy/Funkwhale/Matrix accounts for $29/year (Disclosure, I'm founder)

Have the apps API access been officially restored?

No, they won't be and the majority of people didn't care. Which is kind of my point?

private API keys stop working

That will not happen. If they kill the API for good and do the same thing that happened at Twitter, all the bots from Reddit are going to disappear and it's going to cause a hit on Reddit traffic.

The number of people who cared enough about third-party apps is not enough to affect their bottom line, so as long as they managed to get (say, 80% of the Apollo/Sync/Infinity users into the official client is enough)

Nah, there is no more concerted effort from the mods to get people out of Reddit. The mods that still wanted to take action were kicked out, the others that remained are too afraid to lose their "power mod" status or were appointed by Reddit itself to take charge.

it will take some other new event to take place for people to get mobilized again. Reddit won that battle.

It doesn't matter if it's a post of Taylor Swift or someone from /r/wallstreetbets convincing the mob to short RDDT and to move to Lemmy, we are talking about any random scenario that manages to get 300k people interested in Lemmy.

how are instances supposed to handle 300k new users overnight?

They won't. Not at first. First we will get maybe 50k, LW will do their thing and try to gobble up the majority of users, alien.top can also help absorb part of this crowd and I could even finally convince some other admins to set up fediverser on their instances to help with the migration.

But the important thing is that this type of backing from the mainstream would mean free marketing.

do you expect those hundreds of thousands of new users to get a Communick subscription?

All of those people, of course not. But I expect the increased user base and media attention to bring the following:

• more instance admins realizing that this is not sustainable to be run as a hobby
• power users who want to run their own instance
• companies looking to establish their presence online (therefore looking for a quick/simple way to set up an instance)
• increased usage in the topic-based instances, which can open potential revenue streams.
• more people realizing the limitations of the server-centric approach and becoming interested in a single "Social Browser app"

All of those things translate indirectly into more business opportunities, none of which need to sacrifice the ideals of the open social web.

"oh, I want it to grow, I just don't it want to grow with people that I don't like"

You can dress it however you want, it's still elitist, reactionary and exclusive.

Quantity is quality, if you have good filters in place.

I never understood people that argue something is bad by looking at the median case. The problem of Reddit, Twitter and Facebook is not due to the amount of people they have, and they were absolutely fine until they tried to exploit their userbases.

(Aside for @blaze@feddit.org: see what I mean about Fedi's anti-growth and reactionary culture? Our friend here is not an isolated case)

If you are that famous or worried about trademark, you shouldn't be using someone else's server. Tom Hanks can just buy e.g tomhanks.actor domain and set up the @me@tomhanks.actor AP actor.

I keep repeating this: the weird part is that we still have all these companies and institutions being okay with depending on someone else's namespace. Having the NYT still announcing their Twitter or Instagram for social media presence is the same as using aol.com for their email.

marginalized groups, and the fear that someone is creating a database that could be used to easily seek them out and use it for trolling and such.

The fear might be justified. I don't question that the issue exists, but the belief that they can stop it.

Let me repeat: there is no real privacy in any social network. If people are genuinely afraid of being targeted because of what they write online, the solution is not to give them a false sense of privacy, but to educate and empower them to use messaging platforms that are provably secure.

Those that are telling marginalized folks to use instance XYZ because "they don't federate with threads and therefore are safe" think that they are being helpful, but in reality are putting them at even more risk because they are telling all of them to concentrate in the same place and make the targeted tracking even easier for malicious actors.

Yeah, lots of people were trying to point that out, those people were not the ones screaming at snarfed. It was the "mah privacy" crowd that was panicking at the thought of data being available and searchable in a server outside of their own.