this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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Fedigrow
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To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks
Resources:
- https://lemmy-federate.com/ to federate your community to a lot of instances
- [email protected] to organize overall fediverse growth
- [email protected] to keep tabs on where new users might come from :)
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Agree to disagree
I am interested in system administration, I just prefer not to commit to it on top of keeping dozens of communities active and promoting Lemmy and others on Reddit.
That's what I meant previously: we both dedicate our time and energy to different activities about the platform.
Yeah, right...
What upsets me in this whole thing is that you present an impossible dilemma: if I run the instance, you won't participate because you think it is associated with the money-making business. If I say "okay, then you go find an instance that is topic specific and and only for groups", you find any possible reason to balk.
So here we are: you want to have someone that can focus on instance administration and you want to focus on building communities, but God forbid you even consider doing it a way that is only tangentially connected to a commercial venture. That is the part I don't understand.
None of the admins of the instances above have stated that they are actively looking to make a business out of the platform.
So? I never said I want to make money out of the instances.
Let me phrase in another way: all of the admins teams of the instances above are different. They are all different teams, but I regularly interact with them, and they are all quite nice people to talk to. I even like talking to the LW sysadmins.
On the other hand, why would I host a community to one of your instances, when all you do is argue with me? We have different visions on the platform, and that's fine. I don't even get why you suggest one of instances, it seems a bad idea due to our regular disagreements.
My tone changed after you refused any form of collaboration and resorted to the most absurd excuses (like the football domain episode).
I wasn't being hostile to you when you came asking if you could have access to the user votes. I thought it was something visible for moderators, but when you said that it was only for admins I even offered to host an instance for you for free. All you needed to do was get a domain name. You refused.
And your tone now is pleasant and agreeable.
The football episode was when you revealed how much you were paying for all those domain names for the 20 instances, as well as the operating costs. Again, seemed like a risk to me. The domain itself wasn't the actual reason, it was the risk of seeing you disappear overnight or having to cease operations due to cost.
I refused the free instance because I didn't want to use your resources for something as minor as being able to see votes.
Now, it certainly isn't.
What if I told you that Communick has reached break-even point, and since February it makes more in revenue than it costs to operate?
Oh, that's right, I told you that already! It's just that you didn't react to it. Could it be because it doesn't fit your worldview?
Then let's just stop here?
If you prefer to avoid the conversation on the basis of "unpleasantness" instead of facing the arguments that are being presented to you, it's your choice.
But at least show some decency and willingness to admit you were wrong and consider that maybe the best way to get a sustainable, healthy and universal Fediverse (i.e, not just a niche thing that barely reaches 1M MAU) is by having small businesses around?
My main reason to want to end conversations with you is that you use bad faith arguments. It also explains why I don't want to build community on your instances.
I regularly suggest to agree to disagree, you just don't want to.
Let's give this another try
How is having a business going to change that? The platform is here, Boost is a clone from it's Reddit version, Voyager and others offer good alternatives.
Network effect can't be fought by money. Meta spend millions on marketing Threads, it's a failure.
Finally, I recently asked how many people were ready to pay for the Fediverse: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/33116369?scrollToComments=true
Seems to reflect my perception that some people are okay to pay 10-20$ per year, but not much more, and that's not everyone. I'll repost it to the new community now so that we have more data.
Now again, if you believe so, that's your choice, please create a community to advocate for that perspective.
You are looking at this super-tiny space of "the Threadiverse" and taking it as the whole "social media landscape". This is textbook example of selection bias.
How much do you want to bet that we will see a Reddit-like alternative built on ATProto by the end of the year? Which one do you think will have a better chance of success: the application that is starting of a potential userbase 1M MAU or the one with 25M+? How was Bluesky funded? Was it via donations?
No, but money can buy infrastructure and development which is sorely needed. We are not limited because people don't want to leave the walled gardens. They are eager to leave, but we keep failing to offer them an usable alternative.
The reason that Fediverse doesn't grow is not because of any single particular feature of the other alternatives. It's quite easy to say "Bluesky won over Mastodon because it has better content discovery" or "Matrix is not a good alternative to Discord because it is slow and has a moderation problem", but all of these tiny things are not fundamental issues. They can all be fixed, but they just don't get fixed fast enough because these organizations are lacking in resources compared to the VC funded alternatives.
Funding is like oxygen. Organisms that do not have circulatory systems can only grow to the size of insects. If we keep constraining ourselves to only these very limited sources of funding, we will be forever bound to this tiny insignificant niche space.