rglullis

You are avoiding a question and using "other people" as a distraction, instead of commiting yourself to an opinion.

It is not the first time that you do that. Why?

Do you want the Fediverse to be a soup kitchen or do you want to be as good as of a dining experience as it can be?

Ok, which part of "multiple metrics" is not clear here?

Every risk analysis will have multiple factors. The idea is not to always have an absolute perfect ranking system, but to build a classifier that is accurate enough to filter most of the crap.

Email spam filters are not perfect, but no one inbox is drowning in useless crap like we used to have 20 years ago. Social media bots are presenting the same type of challenge, why can't we solve it in the same way?

I wasn't the one starting the protests against Reddit, and I am not the screaming at my computer whenever Elon Musk says something completely stupid.

I just thought that after all these years, more people have understood what "when you don't pay for the product, you are the product" really meant.

Platforms like Reddit and Tumblr need to optimize for growth. We need to have growth, but it is does not be optimized for it.

Yeah, things will work like a little elitist club, but all newcomers need to do is find someone who is willing to vouch for them.

Just add "account age" to the list of metrics when evaluating their trust rank. Any account that is less than a week old has a default score of zero.

I highly doubt that it will actually make any useful amount of money.

Consider yourself lucky if you manage to break even. I am 5 years into this and the Fediverse side of things have been nothing but a money pit. The only thing that is not keeping me completely in the red is the custom Matrix hosting.

If you value the admin/mod costs at $0

Yeah, and developers. Apparently, they all think development of Lemmy, alternative frontends, supporting tools, client libraries and everything that enables the ecosystem falls out of the sky.

That thread is ridiculous. It's downright offensive to everyone working in free software and shows how little they are valued.

Ok, so let's make it clear that the whole talk about "it would be nice to make it profitable" is not serious, and also make it clear that your idea of "supporting the instances" is just equivalent to cover the hardware costs, which is a rounding error compared to the cost of human labor involved.

There is just so much more going on that you are taking for granted, I don't even know where to start:

• Developers of the leading projects
• Developers of ancillary projects (fediseer, CSAM detection, alternative frontends, etc...)
• The labor of instance admins
• The labor of moderators

By saying that you are covering the cost of the hardware, you are basically saying that the work of everyone else is worth zero. This is downright offensive.

maybe you meant that one time I refused to get a communick subscription?

No, not really. At the moment I am more upset about the fact that you are one of the most active users here, that you jump instances every two weeks or so and yet you seem to think that contributing $1/year is "enough" to support the work of everyone involved here.

Imagine going to a farmer's market and saying "how come do you sell those eggs for 10€ a dozen, you can feed 25 chickens for a whole month with that, if they lay 1 egg per day you are getting 750 eggs, so I don't see why I should give more than 12/750 euros per egg." and tell me how well that's going to go.

I just checked the Communick prices again, indeed it’s 30$ per year, which is 25 times more expensive than the cost above.

First, the $29/year includes access to Mastodon, Matrix, Lemmy and Funkwhale, with 250GB of space. There is also a 20% pledge of profits to go to the underlying projects. I also need to pay for things that others might be skipping on, like backups, redundant servers, etc.

Second and most important: the $29/year is supposed to buy you peace of mind. My customers are not paying me to "share the costs". They are paying me so they can feel assured that there is one professional taking care of the infrastructure. They are paying me to ensure that I can worry about the bugs in the software instead of them. They are paying me so that they don't have to worry about the instance going under without notice. They are paying me because they know that these things do not come for free.

Managing an instance takes time and requires a team to be done properly. You are suggesting to add a number of instances on a single team.

No, I'm not. I'm saying that I can still manage it if needed. My proposal would be to donate the instances to the team to get rid of this "single point of failure" that you are holding me against.

Have you ever asked them if they would be okay with this?

This is (so far) just a thought experiment, which I am making to illustrate how your logic is flawed. You are saying that my work is not worth the price that I am charging, yet at the same time you think that others will not be interested in doing because it takes time and expertise. Don't you see the contradiction here?

Let instances develop organically. Let them be managed by different teams, with different people, different approaches.

That's very eloquent, but you are still evading the most fundamental issue: If your idea of "growing the network" is to keep waiting to get more enthusiasts who are willing to sacrifice their time and sanity to serve 1-2 thousand users at a time, you are going to wait for a very. long. time. If everyone keeps treating this as a mere hobby, and if users keep thinking like you and refuse to pay for the professionals what they are worth, then the professionals are simply going to go work somewhere else. If you don't believe me, just look at what is happening with Mastodon and Bluesky.

Free labor? Google/FB employ these people.

Why does have it to be one or the other?

Why not use all these different metrics to build a recommendation system?

Nasty meat bags I am talking about is human moderators.