rglullis

How would you do it directly in the software?

How are you feeling about all the talks of KD joining next season?

Right at this moment, it seems that any requests to your server return 500. :(

Newsie.social has (had) 20k active users, mostly professional journalists. It has been threatening to shut down due to lack of funding for two years already. Every month their admin needs to beg around for people to donate.

Fosstodon started with enough donations that they could even send some of their money to upstream projects. Nowadays they are invite-only because they don't get enough funding to sustain infinite growth.

Moth.social was active while they were sponsored by Mozilla, they are shutting down in March 12th due to lack of funding.

I could go on.

There’s no “shortage of instances” going around. As more people join the Fediverse, more admins will start instances.

This is just wishful thinking. Go ahead and open an instance with open registration, see how long it will take for you to regret it.

the vast majority of instance-owners are bored, twiddling their thumbs due to their lack of users.

And there is a huge number of admins that got users and then burned out due to harassment, spam, entitled users asking for/against federation due to petty drama...

There is not a single Mastodon &server out there that have increased donations or reach a sustainable level after they reach a few thousand users.

Also, there are not enough admins around "doing it because they want to" if we want the Fediverse to grow a few millions users.

Instagram has 2 billion users, Pixelfed largest instance has less than 200k active users. We would have to get 10 THOUSAND admins in order to compete with Instagram.

Seems to be working fine now. My instance can find yours without any problems.

Can you just tell us what is your domain, so we can help you troubleshoot it?

Look, I already apologized and I mean it. I will just ask you now to reread the thread. You are stating that any independent service provider is as morally bankrupt as a large corporation like Meta. Don't you think that is also not at all insensitive and offensive?

Look, I am sorry. I didn't mean to offend you and I didn't mean to "diagnose you". You asked me why I was responding as if you are angry, and I tried to illustrate how your responses are sounding on this side of the conversation. I might be completely wrong, but this is how I am perceiving it.

I am not angry so I’m not sure what I’ve said that deserved that patronizing aside.

If you are not angry, you are certainly reading as someone who is facing an amygdala hijack. Your responses do not seem as someone who is collected and you do not seem willing to listen to what others are trying to express.

Case in point:

farmers and Walmarts have some features they share (...) Are you saying they don’t? That they are completely different top to bottom?

You are right, we are talking only about the features they share (i.e, profit-seeking) and whether this means that they should be treated equally. I didn't say they were completely different. But do they have to?

Let me try again: you are asserting that a small-scale farmer who works out on their own volition and makes a living by selling their produce at a higher price that it cost them (i.e, seeking profit) is a net-negative to society and as unethical as a huge corporation like Walmart. You are saying "the scale doesn't matter, any one working looking for profit is bad". Is this correct or am I misrepresenting you?

I’m saying scale is irrelevant because profit motive corrupts other values

And OP and I are saying that this generalization is shortsighted. You end up putting on the same bag:

• Small farmers and Walmart
• A local restaurant owner and Darden
• Independent commercial software providers and Facebook.

By treating them as equal because "both of them are seeking profit", you are left with an economic system that is unable to grow to match the demands of the people.

Make an actual point.

I did, many times. It's just that you don't want to hear it.

The point is "Community is not enough" (I did link to the blog post, didn't I?) and I've been saying since 2022 that the Fediverse will not be able to grow until is dominated by this belief "that every profit-seeking business is bad and therefore should be rejected".

You can be mad at me all you want, you can be upset at this sad reality all you want, you can cry in a pillow all you need, but you can not say that the Fediverse has been a success story. We've had so many opportunities handed out to us to take this place and grow to become a viable alternative for everyone but we squander it every time because the loud minority of ideologues keep screaming "no businesses here!".

Scale however does not matter.

Of course the scale of the business matters. If scale doesn't matter, a bunch of farmers selling their produce at a local market would be bad for their local community as Walmart.