rglullis

Nasty meat bags I am talking about is human moderators.

Well, I am on record saying that we should get rid of one-dimensional voting systems so I see your point.

But if anything, there is nothing stopping us from using both metrics (and potentially more) to build our feed.

That would be only true if people only marked that they trust people that conform with their worldview.

I didn't say your time is worthless. I am actually impressed with how much you've done here. What I am saying is that you only support things with your time, and you refused to help whenever money was involved. Is that not accurate?

pay the costs and spend time managing all of these topic specific instances?

So you acknowledge that running instances do have costs that need to be covered somehow. That's already a good thing.

Anyway, to make the case here: I am willing to move ownership of the instances to feddit.org's OpenCollective and even keep managing it, as long as there is understanding that they should be topic specific and closed for registrations. The idea would be to have feddit.org as the instance for people, and the topic instances as home for groups.

If that were to happen, would you move your communities there?

as you seem convinced this userbase is there and ready to use your services

No, I am convinced of its potential. There is a difference.

This is not just over the Lemmy userbase.

• It's the million+ people using Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, etc.
• It's the million+ people that still pay for Reddit Gold, and could be paying a fraction of that and still have a good experience on the Fediverse.
• It's the millions of people that were on Twitter and now are (likely) going to end up on Bluesky
• It's the millions of people that pay $10/month for Spotify but could be well served by a Funkwhale instance
• It's every writer that is on Substack but could be making a living with subscription-based access like https://sub.club or the payment gateway features from https://mitra.social

When I am dreaming of 10-15k users, I am looking at all the potential userbase, not the existing one.

Honestly, what bothers me a bit is you saying "It would be nice the Fediverse became profitable", but from all our interactions you seem to only support efforts that do not require any material (i.e, financial contribution) from you, and you have been purposefully avoiding contributing to the topic-based instances that I have set up.

I'll tell you one thing, I am thinking about giving away all the topic-based instances to the collective behind feddit.org. If I do that, would you move away your communities there?

Why not "good luck on making Communick work"?

a paywall adds a considerable barrier to entry.

The idea is to get rid of "instances with open registrations". It doesn't mean that paywalled instances are the only way to achieve that.

• We can have more people running their own small servers to share with their friends
• We can have companies providing ActivityPub accounts to customers of their services (e.g, sign-up to the NYT and get access to any of the servers managed by Mastodon GmbH)
• We can have companies operating their own AP servers for their employees
• We can have phone/internet companies giving access to their AP servers as long as they have a contract or a positive balance on the top-up
• We can have "pay it forward" instances: admins put up donations, but they explicitly declare how much they want per active user account. The instance only accepts new registrations when it has secured the resources.

Have you considered finding another job in the meantime?

What makes you think I am not looking?

because the admin is tired of dealing with assholes on the internet.

You know another way to not deal with assholes on your instance? Charge just enough to make sure that people are minimally invested, and point them to the Terms of Service as the reason they are getting kicked out for egregious behavior.

maybe preferably, better tools need to be developed

If better tools was all that was missing, Big Tech would develop them and get rid of all these nasty meat bags. And as much as Google tries to do just that, they still hire tens of thousands of content moderators around the world for YouTube.

You have soup kitchens all over the world, the volunteers working for them do so because it gives them meaning,

The fact that things do not have a price do not mean that they are free. Somebody had to pay to get the food done and the volunteer can not take the hours worked in a kitchen soup and exchange for a discount on their electricity bill.

What current job?

I started Communick as a side-project in the end of 2019, but in July of last year I lost my job and decided to make this really work.

Nice, I just hope that you are contributing with more than $1-2 per year. ;)

Also, if you understand the importance of support it the instances, why don't you wish that everyone did the same?

Not to single you out, but this attitude is unbelievably frustrating. Everyone here loves to waste hours of their day signaling their virtue and complaining about all the evils done by the corporations, but so few are actually willing to put any skin in the game. they complain about entshittication from Spotify and Netflix, but religiously continue paying their subscriptions while refusing to support smaller, independent businesses.