Yeah, it's a bit self-serving. Thing is, I could not think of other term to convey this idea as succinctly. Maybe "Fetish" would be better, but it would still carry sexual connotations.
rglullis
joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
Are you sure? Because I have a couple of older phones that were USB-C and their port was the first thing to fail...
The "implied perverse thrill" seems a bit of projection on your part, and the idea of "visually appealing/stimulating images that have no context and at best provide a simulacrum of interest in the object or activity" is a very good definition of porn.
why wouldn’t you do it?
Personally? because I don't really care about comments and posts from people who think that 5 seconds to select an option is too much time.
Some friction is a good thing. If having to select the language to complete the post works as a filter, then you can bet that the ones being caught in that are the ones who are less likely to add anything meaningful or thoughtful to the discussion.
One of the things that really make sense but might be overkill is to have integration with any of the open source Large Language Models. The client could wouldn't have to ask the user or rely or system settings, and autodetect the language. Depending on the content, it would even make sense to have some override system (e.g, I am not fluent in Spanish, but I would be interested in seeing football news from La Liga directly in Spanish without having to wait for the UK newspapers to pick it up)
but can save a lot of time in the long run and some frustration for people that want to post in your communities.
On the other hand, it will most likely mean that people will just default to post without any language. And if no one does it, then why bother with the option at all?
My feeling is that the "right" way to fix this is by improving the client, instead of just making things completely relaxed.
Nice, I went ahead and created !aom@level-up.zone . As soon as you make a post there I can make you a moderator as well.
I'm really glad to see more people getting the point of these instances. Reducing drama is certainly one of the biggest factors, and "good fences make good neighbors" is a good principle here.
what’s the business model for a paid service
It's a difficult one, if I am being honest. I started this as a side project because I believed that with all the abuses from Facebook and Twitter, people would finally understand that "if you are not paying for the product, you are the product" is not just a nice slogan. Unfortunately, it seems that the large majority of people will rather live jumping from instance to instance and project to project instead of paying a few bucks per month to support independent developers.
But to give you a more cheerful response, Communick is not just about Fediverse. My background is in telecommunications, and the idea is to offer any type of service for messaging that is based on open standards, which also includes VoIP. It also provides Matrix and I've been trying to figure out how I can add support for SIP calling in a way that could make this a compelling alternative for Digital nomads that need to deal with multiple phone numbers.
Looking at the Fediverse only, some reasons to charge for access:
- it is a lot easier to handle moderation. Trolls and spammers are not willing to pay a few bucks per month when they can do it for free in the open instances.
- the instances never get oversubscribed. I only need to invest in more infrastructure if I have more customers. All of the "free" instances end up invariably having to close registrations, or to beg for donations or simply crumble under their own weight.
- I strongly believe that charging a bit from everyone is more fair than asking big donations from some people to make up for the freeloaders.
- There should be enough people out there who know how much their time is worth and understand the value proposition to make this a sustainable business.
- Because of federation, network effects are not a huge deal. A theoretical centralized social network with tens of thousand users is pretty much dead, but Communick can be relevant to its customers even when we are super small.
Yeah, I have created a bunch of topic-based instances with the idea of having communities created in "neutral ground" and avoiding issues like "instance from instance Z has defederated from X and Y, so now the people need to create duplicate communities and/or duplicate accounts".
The whole list of instances is on the sidebar of !communick_news_network@communick.news if you are interested.
Also, because I got someone reporting me for not "disclosing my interests". Communick is a business. It makes money by providing paid access accounts to Fediverse services, like communick.news and mastodon.communick.com. These topic-based instances however are never going to be closed or exclusive to paying customers. Anyone that wants to create a new community based on a specific interest, just send me a DM and I will happily create it and make you a moderator. I created them to help organize communities during the migration and to distribute the load from all the mirrored content from alien.top.
And my point is that the your complaints are not related to the protocol, but the applications using it.
Not only that, we are talking about different layers of the OSI model. XMPP should be compared with HTTP, not ActivityPub. There is absolutely nothing stopping someone from implementing the ActivityStreams vocabulary on XMPP.
None of your questions are about the protocol, but implementation details of the application.
And... that if "activitypub just works" , so does XMPP.
And... XMPP servers offer better performance and taking less resources than any of the leading AP projects.
And... XMPP already has E2EE.
"Best Guitar Pics" is dull and completely unimaginative. It's the "Microsoft Approach of Naming Products (TM)"; which does not allow itself to take any risks and ends up being soulless, corporate, empty. Or to use a more contemporary reference: it's the type of slop that ChatGPT would produce if someone asked "suggest a name for a community for people to share pictures of guitars".