epicspongee [they/them or he/him]

Sponge. But epic.

  • 0 Posts
  • 12 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I think as we start defederating and making decisions we are setting up a dangerous situation where it becomes potentially easy to defederate for the wrong reasons.

    Mastodon has operated this way for years and it’s worked out really well. They’re currently at 12 million or 13 million users right now. Read my comment I wrote on it here. Basically all the Nazis flee to the Nazi servers because they can’t follow or subscribe to their fellow Nazis or talk about Nazi stuff. So they leave. This makes it safer for users and easier for mods to keep their users safe.

    And like… sure, there’s drama. People defederate for dumb reasons. But Mastodon accounts are portable and you can hop around from server to server easily. And 99% of the time people don’t defederate for no reason.

    Some religions and communities might have beliefs that appear to be pseudoscience or even discrimination.

    This is often because they are. My old fundamentalist Christian cult I grew up in was incredibly homophobic. They ‘looked’ like they had beliefs that were discriminatory because they were. You do not get a ‘be a bigot free’ card because your religion says you are one. You can change your shitty religion (conservative fundamentalist religions have done so tons of times in the past). Minorities cannot change who they are. There are tons of other religious communities that do not discriminate against minorities so that standard is not unreasonable.


  • It can’t last. Right now, lemmy/ActivityPub is in the “early adopter” stage of the tech hype cycle.

    Folks have been saying this about Mastodon for years and it’s only grown. Facebook’s now looking at investing in ActivityPub. It’s a W3C standard for federation on the internet and the amount of apps supporting it is only growing.

    I think probably the most bleak thing that could happen is that maybe Lemmy has a smaller user base and only a small amount of people convert over from Reddit. But even then I’m kinda happy with that. I like what I’m doing on here and I like the community so far. And I could deal with a smaller set of communities that are ad-free, have a pretty great experience, etc. etc.


  • I think people really overestimate how much stuff like this costs relative to how much users are willing to spend. My 1.5k user Mastodon instance costs roughly $100/mo for managed hosting. I set up a donation portal on OpenCollective and got fiscally hosted by the Open Collective Foundation (giving us 501©(3) status).

    Overnight we got one-time donations covering more than six to eight months of our hosting costs. Our monthly donations are double our hosting costs. And we’ve gotten donations from private charity funds and are eligible for grants. This is all from less than 1% of our user base paying us just a little bit, usually <$10.

    Lemmy is infinitely more efficient to host than Mastodon, and I’m sure some Elixir-based alternative will come along and make it cheaper to host too. The fact that Patreon is as successful as it is right now and that creators can make a living off of it shows that this model is self-sustaining and that you don’t need advertisements or to profit.






  • Girl calm down, please just take a step back. Maybe read up on communism or communists / the far left before blaring off takes like this. I’m not an ML and not a fan of them as an anarchist, but this is suchhhhh an overreaction to what they actually said.

    Additionally if you don’t like the dev team, then fork it. Or volunteer to be on the core team. Submit some PRs. Start your own alternative. One of the cool things about having anticapitalists develop software is that it is open and you can do that. It actively does the opposite of what capitalism wants us to do. I think just that fact alone should make you pause and maybe reassess the language you’re using (Hitler and other fascists rose to power actively aided and funded by capitalists because it helped retain their power).



  • I mean you’re more than free to start contributing to Lemmy and / or offer to be on the core team. You can fork it and start your own version of it not owned by them. The nice thing about having a communist (or at least an anticapitalist) developing it instead of a capitalist is that you have the freedom to do that. You cannot do that with Twitter, or with Reddit, or with Facebook, or with Instagram.

    Capitalists will not voluntarily do that because it is unprofitable to them. Companies that do end up floundering or dead.

    Idk to me there’s a very real difference between the two and I’d rather have a tankie developing a platform than someone like Elon Musk making it go to shit.