That’s been always the case on other platforms on top of the official ads. Damn every now and then you’d see what’s clearly an guerilla ad campaign hitting the front page of reddit.
Reddit got WAY worse in the last 5-7 years though. I think corporations got more ok with it after best practices were both cemented and more publicized after the 2016 presidential election. Previously astroturfing was there for political campaigns and state actors, but more shady. Then Russia went off the rails with agitprop, Cambridge Analytical was all in the news, and everyone realized how pervasive and easy it was. Now everyone does it, and often.
Many mastodon instances shut down. There’s always a risk that at some point the donations are not enough to sustain an instance. It could be very problematic if mods lose their communities when an instance shutdown.
Perhaps what we need is a backup code or some kind of exportable file with all our data (subbed communities, interactions, yadda yadda) which we can port over to a new instance if necessary.
Yeah, especially with Lemmy which is a lot more permanent than Mastodon is. You can screenshot your old toots but you can’t screenshot a userbase. There should be a way to migrate a community to another instance while keeping the subscriptions.
Mastodon does this (you can download a full backup of your entire account - although not sure about media) every 7 days, which can be imported into various other Fediverse platform accounts, depending on what they allow.
I suspect that all Fediverse platforms worth their salt will make this a core feature.
The new Xperia 1 V looks amazing and is coming out this month. It is really expensive but is one of the only phones nowadays that comes with an aux jack and a micro SD card slot. It’s great having a phone with 1.25-1.5 TB of space for lossless music, photos, etc and not having to pay monthly for cloud storage. I’ve always been a Samsung guy but since they followed Apple and ditched the basics I may try a Sony phone in the near future if there’s a price drop or a refurbished deal. The biggest criticism I see with Sony phones is that they only commit to 2 years of updates, which for $1,400 is quite lousy considering other brands offer 4 years of update support for their phones.
The concept of the Fediverse is horizontal rather than vertical growth - i.e. More smaller instances rather than increasing the capacity of the larger ones. We’re also seeing that Lemmy currently only scales to a certain degree. Right now, most instances are either covered by their admin because they’re so small that the cost is manageable or instances are setting up donations.
It’s conceivable that a business would set up an instance and charge for it - but I think it unlikely. A year town the road, though, who knows?
Doesn’t really make sense, if they’re federated then you wouldn’t need to pay them to access their content. If they’re not federated then what are you paying for?
You’re paying for reliability, continuity, possibly a domain name which may give a sense of exclusivity. By joining a “free” server, you don’t actually have a contract or terms of service.
Nope, no way I’m going back. However, I’m still fairly new so I haven’t really “researched” which instances I should be joining. Except for lemmynsfw…for obvious reasons. LOL
The problem they’re seeing with Mastodon is all of the communities that are vowing to never federate with their instance because you just know it’s going to turn into EEE.
The problem they’re seeing with Mastodon is all of the communities that are vowing to never federate with their instance because you just know it’s going to turn into EEE.
The problem they’re seeing with Mastodon is all of the communities that are vowing to never federate with their instance because you just know it’s going to turn into EEE.
The problem they’re seeing with Mastodon is all of the communities that are vowing to never federate with their instance because you just know it’s going to turn into EEE.
I think most people are assuming we’ll have the ability to fend off anything. All it’s going to take is Zuck creating a new fediverse-enabled platform and just giving everyone with an Instagram account access using their already existing accounts. We’ll be outnumbered by the millions.
This is a big part of the shift in mentality that needs to happen. Something doesn’t have to be the biggest to be better. We don’t need millions of concurrent users per server to enjoy connecting with other people and sharing ideas and art.
Like, a local cafe doesn’t need to beat the profit margins of a Starbucks, it just needs to make ends meet. And it’s probably a lot better experience in the process.
I have the same setup but with transmission instead of qbittorrent. Make sure you map the listening port of qbittorrent to the forwarded port from pia in gluetun.
I added the VPN_PLRT_FORWARD command on the Gluetun container. It gave me a port. I added that to qbit, and it seemed to work! I’m now wondering why the speeds are so slow though? My download is at upwards of 15MB/s, but the uploads are in the KBs and Bs. I know other people leeching affect the speed, but I figured it has to be faster than that right? Do you think I did something wrong?
I’m going to try with a Linux distro to see if it’s my set up, or just the torrent themselves.
PIA upload is definitely faster than that. It doesn’t saturate my connection but I’ve seen it upload at 5MB/s+ at times. Are you sure you have the right options for the gluetun container as shown in the wiki? You’ll see the port PIA assigns you in the logs. Testing with a linux iso probably won’t help much since the ratio of seeders/leechers is high. Try a popular newly released torrent instead.
So I just tried a torrent from nyaa.si that had hundreds of seeders and hundreds of leechers.
After it finished downloading, the upload speed has fluctuated from 900kb/s up to ~1.52mb/s. Way better than before, but still feels slower than it should? Idk.
I think you can consider the issue solved at this point… Last thing to check is the cpu usage while the torrent is active. If it’s being pegged, that could limit your speeds.
Realistically every instance can monetize in whatever way they see fit but I highly doubt this’ll be a thing. Mastodon is way bigger and more expensive than Lemmy and it runs just fine through donations. No reason why the same won’t work here.
This might work for now, but I’m skeptical how well this would work in the long run. Do those company pay a monthly fee to be there? What happens when there’s a hundred companies on that list? What happens if a company pays a substantial amount to be there and threatens to stop paying if xyz doesn’t happen?
Just like there’s Lemmy and Kbin that powers the “threadiverse” / reddit-like portion of the fediverse, Mastodon is only one software that enables micro-blogging like experiences. There’s Pleroma, Misskey and many more. And of course there’s always the possibility for more to be developed over time.
Of Mastodon there’s likely hundreds of so-called “forks” out there. Since it is open source, people can take that source code, and host their own version of the project. This means they can make their own changes, include changes by others, remove features they don’t like, and so on.
Mastodon is not just run by a handful of people owned by a corporation, forced to work for them. Large parts of the project are contributed by volunteers, which can jump ship to another implementation as soon as they feel like the one they’ve contributed to is not acting in the interest of users.
Admins which actually host Mastodon instances get to decide when to update to a newer version, or whether they want to use a fork that includes the features they like (which the “official” Mastodon project has not (yet) included) or anti-features that might’ve been put there due to pressure from outside (possible but less likely).
The power here is in the hands of users and admins. We just have to be careful not to let a company like Google or Facebook/Meta take control over a substantial portion of the fediverse. See also: How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)
I do agree with most of your points, except for one.
Mastodon is not just run by a handful of people owned by a corporation, forced to work for them.
Yes, for now. What happens when it requires so much administration and development that someone needs to manage it? Eventually, it will get big enough that its required to be a company. You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
Yes and Mastodon itself is a registered non-profit organization. There’s a few people they’re able to pay to work on the projects, thanks to sponsors and donations. But there’s a lot more contributors (over 800). I think the people doing valuable work on FOSS projects have a lot of opportunity to work elsewhere if they feel like they’re being made to do things antithetical to their values. Not to mention the amount of noise they could make to expose the project and its shady goals, if that were the case. Things do work differently for FOSS projects than your average for-profit investor-driven project.
For many people, myself included, paying $10 a month for some VC schmuck to buy another pina coloda while he’s resting on the beach smoking a Cuban cigar laughing about how much money he made from exploitation is a no-way. On the contrary, paying $10 once every few months to cover hosting costs for a service we all enjoy using and is not misusing our funds is something a lot are happy to do.
When I purchase something or subscribe to a service (the only subscription services I have are servers I rent sooo…) I think twice about whether I wanna spend this money because I can find a loophole around it, donating to keep my instance alive is something I’m ready to do.
And that’s really the only sustainable way things like this can exist. The Internet has been having it’s free lunch for so long we’ve forgotten how to buy our own.
I’d say it’s more that we’ve been paying out the nose in the form of offering up our data and digital autonomy, and by allowing not only the Internet but our societies at large to degrade and polarize. We’ve paid dearly for our ‘free’ services, in the case of the US with everything from our reproductive rights to our connections with our own families and communities.
I’d much rather pay the price of an extra latte now and then for real internet communities than deal with actual Nazis and orbital Teslas for some shitty undermoderated ad feeds infested with trolls, AI, and literal societal saboteurs on the payrolls of Putin and Winnie the Pooh.
I mean, it is possible that instance admins will be able to show advertising on ones instance, but you will be able to find dotation based, ad-free instance instead. Lemmy as a whole won’t be monetized, only a particular instance. But it’s only my guess
A lot of UX work still needs to be done for sure. Not sure if it's exactly what you're looking for, but there are scripts to redirect links to your home instance if that's what you mean. Try these (requires a userscript extension like Violentmonkey):
kbin.life
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