Honestly I do look at American politics with amusement. When I was younger I always thought my country was shitty and western world is a shining palace, and reddit and Lemmy broke that illusion of mine.

More I look at your politicians, I realised yours and mine aren't as different as one might think they are. Like yes, you got better infrastructure and civic sense, yet in some ways we're in same boat.

Let's state plainly: the title is false. I use lemmy; you're using lemmy; the other commentators are using lemmy.

There's a concept I've been mulling over for a while--and economists probably have a term for it of which I'm ignorant of--that is that free software fails in capitalist market economies. I expect that statement to create a knee-jerk reaction. The truth is free-software is everywhere and as computers become ever more embedded into our economies free-software's presence will only grow exponentially. It's often the foundation for computerised economies.

Free-software enthusiasts understand that its become endemic to the economy. However businesses and consumers still ignore it even when it might be prudent to select or fund free-software. To ignore it seems contradictory to a lot of ideals. A capitalist business should use free-software as the monetary cost is zero: it's a free product. Revolutionary organisations should adopt free-software is it aligns with their ideologies. Yet we know they don't. These actors are acting irrationally.

Free-software lacks something that is a prerequisite to participate in an economy: capital. It has no money to propagandise itself. To phrase it another way: it has no money to buy ads. Without ads it doesn't exist to entities who do have capital.

In Australia Reddit brought ad-space inside shopping-centers. Commercial software has revenues from which a portion can be spent on advertising and its through this advertising that growth can occur. The reason why lemmy has a small user-base is because it has no revenue streams. It’s an economic sink.

If we were to imagine that the user-pool was to dramatically increase what would actually occur? I imagine many instances would be overwhelmed with traffic, knocking them offline. For those that remain a lot of traffic would be perceived as spam. There is no revenue stream that's attached to that user-base. If there was you would--absolutely!--see lemmy's user-base increase as there would be a profit incentive: more users would equate to more profit. The current reality is that more users equates to more debts.

The market for 'internet-forums' has already consolidated into the big-players we know of. Maybe someone could take lemmy's code and usurp the established vendors. That behaviour is already underway now; it's why we have a multitude of lemmy instances. Maybe the next titan of 'internet-communities' will be running a lemmy stack. Not all operators are hosting lemmy with ideology/charity being at the fore. Some site operators are asking themselves, "how can I monetise this?"

From my perspective the issue isn't why people don’t use lemmy, it's why is hosting so expensive? The prerequisites to self-hosting (whether it be for personal use or for an established group or organisation) are costly. One has to pay rent on a DNS, static-IP, hardware and data connections. These prerequisites are commercial in nature and are priced as if every buyer has a revenue stream from which these rents are payed from.

If an individual/group wants independence and decides to self-host they're taking on these rents that have been priced at commercial rates. Those are the monetary hurdles. There's an intellectual hurdle too: a group needs to have members that know how to administer and maintain servers. The prerequisites are rather burdensome. It should then not come as a surprise that a group of young people who play video-games with each other elect to have their community on discord, or whatever commercial-entity takes on the economic and intellectual burdens. These commercial entities hide the complex nature of computer systems and the economic relationships that exist. In exchange they're chasing speculative profits. They have revenue coming in from which they can apportion to advertising and paid programmers. They have the incentives to grow.

In December 2018, Discord announced it had raised $150 million in funding at a $2 billion valuation. The round was led by Greenoaks Capital with participation from Firstmark, Tencent, IVP, Index Ventures, and Technology Opportunity Partners.

Lemmy is reactionary software. It pines for the day's of webmaster superiority.. Where a webmaster ruled a personal fiefdom and brought and sold other fiefdoms. Users should be able to host and maintain servers for themselves and their communities. Economic rents and knowledge-specialisation are high hurdles to overcome. If they are overcome they'll find a wasteland where users have already been captured by existing market players—not only that! They’ll exist side-by-side commercial vendors that pay to have their software blasted from every ad outlet they can afford. The enthusiast or ideologue has sparse capital to attract new users away from their existing 'digital-home' whilst the current players have enormous war-chests and if non-economic forces somehow push new-users towards them (e.g. something ‘viral’) they have insufficient economic resources to accommodate them.

I would advocate for technology like GNUnet, i2p and hyphanet (GNUnet being my personal favorite). Software such as those abolish the major economic-rents that would otherwise be required for the 'clearnet'. (DNS rents are unjustifiable and I would like to direct readers to the OpenNIC project.) However the intellectual burden is increased.

I would like to take a jab at the idea that Reddit (or whatever third-party is used) takes ownership of a community and their user-generated content. They certainly do, but the community leaders voluntarily gave it up. They also neglected their responsibilities. There's no reason why users couldn't have a local-mirror of their community even if it is hosted on a third-party platform. That would negate the reality of a third-party purge and therefore the ‘destruction’ of their community. These communities are irresponsible with irresponsible users. How does one make an irresponsible user responsible? I don't think it can be done.

Well it's an ml account that made you go what the fuck is this place so I guess it's an appropriate response.

Or they meant to post this in another thread, I don't know how it happens but I see it like once a month or so.

That's actually the best defense of reposting I've heard

*resistant to crawling and ddos

must be a suprise, but people dont like kgb propaganda and linux nerds

Diva seems like one of the less shitty .mls. The joke they are making is that the hostility people experience is a direct result of their thighs/ass being so phattt and not the inherent toxic gravity of .ml to disenfranchised would-be crybullies

Default blocks are difficult, one of the things the dev of the Tesseract frontend got absolutely roasted for a few months ago was for how aggressive the block list was and blocking Blähaj just reeks of transphobia. (The primary issue was his lack of disclosure of the existence of the block list.) There is no low controversy way of making a default block list beyond what we already do with most instances defederating a couple of the most egregious instances.

I'm just going to hop in here to remind folks to donate to your instance if you can afford to do so!

I like linux nerds.

In my opinion the following:

1. Minority of very vocal users who get angry if you don’t share every point of their world view. Honestly you can just block most of them.
2. Limited active subgroups - There are only a handful of active subs the rest are just dead. Which leads to…
3. Limited content, posts stay in my feed for a week at a time before being replaced. I often block posts I like just because I’m sick of seeing it in my feed.
4. Shitty moderation - mods here are way worse than Reddit.

I’ll be honest I miss old Reddit, Lemmy feels like an apocalyptic wasteland but it’s still better than most alternative. It’s kind of nice I don’t sit and consume content as much as I used to.

It's because everything that becomes popular starts with people in the 14-20 year range.

Myspace, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Instagram, Vine, Snapchat, Tiktok...

The Fediverse will eventually grow once something triggers a snowball effect due the nature of connectivity and federation. Until then, the way to make it grow is to have young people make it popular.

Edit: There also needs to be more "fun" here. I think the Fediverse is a more "serious" place which isn't what those other social media sites offered. "Serious 24/7" isn't that enticing for young people.

The other day I was imagining a game or game service that has you make a Fediverse account of some kind. You get people to signup with a username that automatically creates a "@fedi.games" account. That account can have access to Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed etc.

The irony:

You are askinf people on Lemmy why people don't use lemmy?

Brother, don't you own a mirror? Go get high and existential on reddit.

Hey, I’m here! wtf just going to ignore me like that??

Tesseract didn't disclose it, if you make the messaging clear then it can work. A button like "Block political communities" with a full list of what's being blocked and a link to the page to edit your block list.

To expand on 3, there are no (that I'm aware of) official community channels for businesses in the Fediverse compared to Reddit. The default avenues to interact with them are usually Discord, Reddit, and even Twitter.

I blame some of the toxicity in the fact that a big chunk of lemmy users came here because they were banned from Reddit precisely for being hostile.

How?

User Experience Friction - You can't just sign up, you need to pick a server. You've already lost a significant amount of people in that step.

I think this can be improved if there was a better way to explain the identity of each instance and why you might want to join other than just "generic Lemmy server for everyone to use"

Also if the random server a new user randomly joins is one of the tankie trifecta they're not gonna have a good time.

I suggest a map that shows which instances are federated/defederated from eachother and lets you find which one has the closest identity to what you like. And possibly a disclaimer before joining one of the trifecta instances.

Or just say fuck it and join the one literally called "shit just works" like me 😂

multiple instances, instances getting shutting down causes people to scatter, limiting lemmys pontential engagement.

some people might get confused for the instance they joined, like world, or ML, instead of another one, they go back to reddit.

When you signup on piefed.social it asks you something like "do you want to see posts about US politics?" And if you don't want to see them, it gives you a filter that hides/dims posts that have "Trump" in the title lol it's pretty effective. It's configurable but the server admin so not every instance will have it, but they might have something similar.

the predicted commie red wave revolution are all here in their dozens, actually about 2000 of them

revolution!

Step 2 is dead right. Before you can proceed, we're going to need you to make an apparently important and irreversible decision that you didn't even want to make, based on incomplete information.

To be fair, karma farmers aren't really possible on Lemmy.

What do you think about the Mbin model? (linked an example post)

Lemmy as a name is very poor branding. It's almost as bad as Mastodon.

This is a blog post. The link was merely shared here by OP.

Is it just the related links under the post? Seems fine to me.

Can confirm, I'm part of the 99%. Never tried Lemmy in the first place.

I'm offended now 😱

People on here are hardly saints lol. I had several people wishing for my death as well as some guy following me around

Hexbear!

If someone wants to act in an unbecoming way, they have a right to provided it isn't breaking the law.

I really don't know why I'm still here, because I'm not a miserable asshole, at least not in the way that makes you enjoy being around Lemmy's userbase.

I want the technology to succeed but it feels like a victim of who's likely to even be interested.

oh it was intentional

Number 1 is the reason I rarely visit Lemmy. The choice and wording of political posts and reactions to them create a very negative atmosphere and sometimes it is combined with rather unrational doomerism. Threads just feel angry and hostile too often for me to have fun on here.
This is even after blocking instances, communities, keywords and some personal ublock rules.

Yeah.

I don't really think I'm an asshole but I'm certainly unhappy.

Misery loves company as they say.

I think I'm here because I crave the dopamine, but am not willing to log in to reddit or whatever else.

Basically it's the best option from a range of bad options.

I thought ML was machine learning🥴

And somehow magically all corporate product names land the one you want and all fediverse or FOSS inventions land the one you don't? Come on it's a quite common, low-hanging fruit complaint. Besides, the domain space for naming things is unpredictable.

And somehow magically all corporate product names land the one you want

No, it's not magic, it's called marketing, market research, and psychology. There are literally billions of dollars that go into advertising, do you think they just magically come up with names?

all fediverse or FOSS inventions land the one you don't

Literally never once claimed that. Mastodon is a little long but at least it's satisfying and conjures up images of a big fuzzy creature instead of a rodent.

what, you don't think it's fun endlessly memeing about doomerism and murder?

Ssh, this is a library.

Also if the random server a new user randomly joins is one of the tankie trifecta they're not gonna have a good time.

It's worse than that. Lemmy just as reddit is mostly American. American election results were kinda... interesting. And Lemmy is very-very-very polarised. So there's likely 33% chance that new American user will get to "politically their" instance, 33% chance they'll get to the instance on the other side of the spectrum, and 33% chance it doesn't matter what instance they'll end up at, they'll be terrified by both sides. So at best it's 33% chance for user to find their hivemind, realistically it's probably much less because even people technically from "your side" might find Lemmy to be way too radical. And that's just Americans, imagine how the rest 96% of the world react to Lemmy.

The autism is this comment is thicker than Earth's mantle. Which is a layer of silicate rock between the crust and the outer core. It has a mass of 4.01×1024 kg (8.84×1024 lb) and makes up 86% of the mass of Earth. It has a thickness of 2,900 kilometers (1,800 mi) making up about 46% of Earth's radius and 84% of Earth's volume. It is predominantly solid but, on geologic time scales, it behaves as a viscous fluid, sometimes described as having the consistency of caramel. Partial melting of the mantle at mid-ocean ridges produces oceanic crust, and partial melting of the mantle at subduction zones produces continental crust.

The easier way to say what you said is that there's no marketing and no money.

Ideally, I think instances ought to be something the casual user can be unaware of. Like the default experience should be instance-independent and the choice of instance should be some trivial thing that you can change on a whim carrying your entire user identity and chat history with you. I don't really get any functional sense of community from my instance anyway

It’s this plus onboarding. Reddit is easy to remember. It tells you exactly what you are getting. Lemmy sounds like a new lemmings games. It gives vintage when it should do the opposite.

It’s a bad name and will never become popular because it’s stupid to say outloud and on top of it onboarding is unnecessarily complicated.

Minority of very vocal users who get angry if you don’t share every point of their world view. Honestly you can just block most of them.

THIS. I'm a progressive, egalitarian, socialist. I believe everyone deserves civil rights, but socially I don't give a fuck about furries or whatever fucking kink you have. Do not equate the fight that gays/trans people have fought for their rights to your weird fetishes anime drawings. This opinion gets me in trouble here.

Big same lol

Niche and local communities are non-existent here. It's either politics, furry memes, or anime posts. It would be nice for the other communities to have engagement.