FYI, the person you're answering to is an admin of https://programming.dev/

Really not sure why you're so angry about it.

You wanted to understand why we thought it would be a good idea, I gave you the context of the previous feedback we received, overall positive.

You wanted us to apologize, I did.

Small suggestion: maybe "sign up" is more clear than "Join"?

You keep conflating the topic-based instances with the subscriptions to the accounts on Communick, even when I made pretty clear that the topic-based instances were meant to be kept open, without monetization and there was no plan to charge for anything there.

And how are you going to cover the ~4000€/year to operate the topic based instances?

Centralization continues to happen around the bigger instances, because the donation-based system is not enough to support the handful of admins that are willing to operate servers as a hobby.

How? Centralization was happening on Reddit when it was privately owned (/r/soccer vs /r/football), network effect is not related to donations.

The Fediverse continues to struggle with growth and attracting mainstream appeal.

This is true but text based forums are in decline in the general population, and Reddit is still benefitting from the network effect. There's a reason why there's no Bluesky for Reddit: the userbase and growth potential is too small.

As a side note, monetization of a forumli or social media is always going to be reluctant. See this recent thread on Discuit: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/ofdJxMA_

The vast majority of people were against a 5$ one time fee.

Couldn’t that apply to lemmy.film as well? Why were you then okay with posting there, but not on soccer.forum or metacritics.zone?

Lemmy.film went down in October 2023: https://lemmy.world/post/7206971?scrollToComments=true

Metacritics first post is from that timeframe: https://metacritics.zone/?dataType=Post&listingType=Local&sort=Old

Did you expect me to go to another single admin instance just after having lost a previous one?

Looks cool

Agreed

I see.

The football community was probably much smaller, so people didn't mind getting notified

That's great!

Thank you for clarifying!

What do you think about the idea in the OP about switching to a DM, potentially in coordination with the instance admins to only reach subscribers?

Don't worry, you have the good approach. If anything, that's a sign we need more generic communities so that everyone can contribute

Hey,

Just wanted to say thank you for your work. Some comments here are a bit harsh, and forget how far behind we would be without Voyager

Thank you, that's very valuable information!

I don’t think the idea is wrong, but I think that the messages should have been direct messages to users that clearly explained why that individual user was receiving the message, plus whatever else you needed/wanted to say. I would have had more rigid criterion for inclusion, too. Subscribers, certainly, and perhaps people who have interacted with the community a minimum number of times within a limited time period. For me, 3 times in 3 months seems generous enough to cast that wide net while also not being overly-broad. So if I were executing this, I would have had the bot direct message people, and say “Hello, I’m a bot acting on the behalf of X community. You are receiving this message because you are a subscriber or have recently interacted with the community. We wanted to let you know that the community is moving! It can be found at Y.”

From @[email protected]