!fediverse
@lemmy.worldhttps://blog.elenarossini.com/fediverse-summer-3-lessons/
Quick question, I’m looking to make an Mbin account and just wanted to ask if there is any lemmy.ml type of situation to be aware of.
I'm really liking the worth RetroMags is doing, and notice they have 16K members, so I assume it's about 4K active monthly users.
I'm wondering if to expand both their users, and the fedizerse's users, if it would make any sense at all to use the servers they use for downloads on a new Lemmy instance, that creates a seperate community for each magazine, and auto populates a new post in the correct community every time they post a new download over on their forums.
They don't REQUIRE membership to download, which is what this whole idea is based on. Since I assume it would be entirely too costly to have downloads on their forums AND a duplicate set of downloads on a seperate server. Seems costly given their massive scale.
Am I dreaming pipe-dreams? Or should I let them know about this idea?
https://www.openread.academy/paper/reading?corpusId=504703860
OpenRead Reading & Notes Taking
https://cohost.org/staff/post/7611443-cohost-to-shut-down
also the August 2024 financial update, but I’m trying not to bury the lede. Hi everyone, We have come to the decision to cease operations of cohost and anti software software club due to lack of funding and burnout. As of today, none of us are being paid for our labor1; all of our money in the bank, and any money coming in from people who buy our merch or don’t cancel cohost plus, is going towards servers and operations — paying the bills so we can turn the lights off with as little disruption as possible. cohost will become read-only on Tuesday, October 1st. At this time, we will make best-effort attempts to keep the servers online through the end of 2024. Development focus has immediately shifted to data export. We have offered minimal data export for GDPR compliance for a while now, but this is a barebones system that doesn’t meet our quality standards. We will be improving this system over the next few weeks and will issue full data exports for all users when the site goes read-only. We will continue to offer downloads of your data export through the end of the read-only period. When the read-only period concludes, we will delete all of your data from our servers without a backup. Even now we want to reiterate that we think “data brokerage” and other common practices of the software industry are inimical to who we are as people, and we would never consider selling your data to others or asserting any rights to stuff you posted under any circumstance. Majority control of the cohost source code will be transferred to the person who funded the majority of our operations, as per the terms of the funding documents we signed with them; Colin and I will retain small stakes so we have some input on what happens to it, at their request. ---------------------------------------- So, what happened? If you’ve read our financial updates, you know that we have never been profitable. This isn’t surprising, even with a team of four; social media is a notoriously unprofitable industry. We had planned to bring in new revenue with eggbux (our tipping and subscription product) but policy changes from Stripe forced us to cancel earlier this year. Since then, we’ve struggled to fill the revenue and morale gap. Colin and I have been doing this for five years, Aidan for three, Kara for nearly two. We’ve been at or over capacity on moderation, engineering, and general operations nearly this entire time. We have all been on-call 24/7/365 since we launched two and a half years ago. The day-to-day needs of just running the site meant developing alternative funding options wasn’t possible. MAU and MRR are down across the year. We’ve managed to build a social media platform that many of our users love, but we just don’t have enough users and we don’t have the resources to safely scale up. It’s important to know when to call it quits. We’re grateful for all the incredible things y’all have created on cohost. We’re grateful for eggbug. We’re grateful that we were able to try and show a better path for social media, even if it didn’t work out exactly as we would have liked. We’re going to do our best to keep things online through the end of the year with the money we have, but we might need additional funding to keep things up until then. If you would be able to contribute funds if necessary, please e-mail us at corp@antisoftware.club [corp@antisoftware.club]. Thank you all for having used cohost. We’ll see you around. :eggbug: ~ jae (and colin, and aidan, and kara) ---------------------------------------- TIMELINE * Immediately: self-service account deletions are available in the settings page [https://cohost.org/rc/user/settings]. account sign-up and activation is no longer available. Please note that if you delete your account before receiving a data export, you will not receive one; there won’t be any data left for us to export. * October 1, 2024: cohost will become read-only. all cohost plus subscriptions will be cancelled. account deletions will remain available. * starting October 1, 2024: we will begin processing data exports for all users. we expect this process to take some time. once your export is ready, you will receive an e-mail with a link to download it. data export downloads will remain available until the servers shut down on December 31. * December 31, 2024: cohost will go fully offline. all user data will be deleted on our way out the door. * January 1, 2025: we will set cohost.org [http://cohost.org] to redirect to the wayback machine2 to prevent link rot. this is something we will be paying for out of pocket since ASSC will no longer be an operating concern, but it’s max $100 per year total so it’s fine. FAQ this space intentionally left blank while we wait for people to frequently ask questions ---------------------------------------- AUGUST 2024 FINANCIAL UPDATE CategoryAs of August 31As of July 31% ChangeExpenses$41,605$41,0521.35%Income$16,307$28,405-42.59%Net income-$25,297-$12,647-100.03%Active subscribers3,0463,128-2.62%MRR$19,477$20,015-2.69%Subscriber churn rate3.18%3.07%3.58%Revenue per subscriber$6.39$6.40-0.16%MAU16,84618,612-9.49%MAU → Subscriber conversion rate18%16.8%7.14%Artist Alley listing weeks sold7389-17.98% Not great! ---------------------------------------- 1. on that note, we’re looking for new jobs. we’ll each be posting about that bit individually. 2. speaking of which, if you’re with archive team please reach out. we’d like to help make sure there’s a recent archive of all public posts but don’t know who to talk to.
cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/13148749
Is that something people would even need/want here?
I recently discovered an interesting (and somewhat disappointing, as we'll find later) fact. It may surprise you to hear that the two most upvoted comments on any Lemmy instance (that I could find at least) are both on Feddit.dk and are quite significantly higher than the next top comments.
The comments in question are:
These upvote counts seems strange when you view them in relation to the post - both of the comments appear in posts that do not even have 300 upvotes.
Furthermore, if you go on any instance other than Feddit.dk and sort for the highest upvoted comments of all time, you will not find these comments (you'll likely instead find this one from @Plume@lemmy.blahaj.zone).
Indeed, if you view the comments from another instance (here and here), you will see a much more "normal" upvote count: A modest 132 upvotes and a mere 17 upvotes, respectively.
What's going on?
Well, the answer is Mastodon. Both of these comments somehow did very well in the Mastodon microblogging sphere. I checked my database and indeed, the first one has 3467 upvotes from Mastodon instances and the second one has 1442 upvotes from Mastodon instances.
Notice how both comments, despite being comments on another post, sound quite okay as posts in their own right. A Mastodon user stumbling upon one of these comments could easily assume that it is just another fully independent "toot" (Mastodon's equivalent of tweet).
Someone from Mastodon must have "boosted" (retweeted) the comments and from there the ball started rolling - more and more people boosted, sharing the comments with their followers and more and more people favorited it. The favorites are Mastodon's upvote equivalent and this is understood by Lemmy, so the upvote count on Lemmy also goes up.
Okay, so these comments got hugely popular on Mastodon (actually I don't know if 3.4k upvotes is unusual on Mastodon with their scale but whatever), but why is there this discrepancy between the Lemmy instances then? Why is it only on Feddit.dk that the extra upvotes appear and they don't appear on other instances?
The reason is the way that Mastodon federates Like objects (upvotes). Like objects are unfortunately only federated to the instance of the user receiving the Like, and that's where the discrepancy comes from. All the Mastodon instances that upvoted the comments only sent those upvotes directly to Feddit.dk, so no other instances are aware of those upvotes.
This feels disappointing, as it highlights how Lemmy and Mastodon still don't really function that well together. The idea of a Lemmy post getting big on Mastodon and therefore bigger on Lemmy and thus spreading all over the Fediverse, is unfortunately mostly a fantasy right now. It simply can't really happen due to the technical way Mastodon and Lemmy function. I'm not sure if there is a way to address this on either side (or if the developers would be willing to do so even if there was).
I personally find Mastodon's Like sharing mechanism weird - only sharing with the receiving instance means that big instances like mastodon.social have an advantage in "gathering Likes". When sorting toots based on favorites, bigger instances are able to provide a much better feed for users than smaller instances ever could, simply because they see more of the Likes being given. This feels like something that encourages centralization, which is quite unfortunate I think.
TL;DR: The comments got hugely popular on Mastodon. Mastodon only federates upvotes to the receiving instance so only Feddit.dk has seen the Mastodon upvotes, and other instances are completely unaware.
Trying to figure this out as in the recent threads a few people said that Bluesky was federated, but it didn't seem to actually be the case.
https://bsky.social/about/blog/02-22-2024-open-social-web in February announced that Bluesky would allow federated servers
The Bluesky documentation on the topic isn't very clear. They mention Bluesky.social a lot, as if it's supposed to be the one central server other PDS need to federate with:
Bluesky runs many PDSs. Each PDS runs as a completely separate service in the network with its own identity. They federate with the rest of the network in the exact same manner that a non-Bluesky PDS would. These PDSs have hostnames such as morel.us-east.host.bsky.network.
However, the user-facing concept for Bluesky's "PDS Service" is simply bsky.social. This is reflected in the provided subdomain that users on a Bluesky PDS have access to (i.e. their default handle suffix), as well as the hostname that they may provide at login in order to route their login request to the correct service. A user should not be expected to understand or remember the specific host that their account is on.
To enable this, we introduced a PDS Entryway service. This service is used to orchestrate account management across Bluesky PDSs and to provide an interface for interacting with bsky.social accounts.
https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/entryway#account-management
Self-hosting a Bluesky PDS means running your own Personal Data Server that is capable of federating with the wider Bluesky social network.
https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds?tab=readme-ov-file#what-is-the-current-status-of-federation
The custom domain name is still something else, and does not seem to require a PDS: https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-tutorial
So, to come back to the title question, do people know of an example of PDS that can be used to access Bluesky without being on the main server?
Decentralised Networks as a Tool for Fighting Disinformation and Censorship: The Fediverse and Free, Collaborative and Open Networks
(LIMITED ACCESS CONTENT)
Analysis of the opportunities and limits of decentralized networks as a resource to overcome the problems of traditional social networks and the resilience of these networks as a tool to fight disinformation and censorship
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-63153-5_2