According to my observations, the Fediverse grows whenever people look for alternative. People do that whenever their comfort is disturbed by material changes. E.g. Reddit gated app APIs, people’s apps started shutting down, protest ensued, it failed, people looked for an alternative, many joined Lemmy as the obvious one. That created one of the largest spikes in active usage. There were others following that. There are network effects keeping people where they are unless there’s a significant force pushing them to overcome that. And so I think the Fediverse would grow the same way it’s grown so far. By being here for people whenever they can’t say or read something the way they were previously able to, as corporations enshittify to profit maximize. You even see them doing that themselves, with Bluesky for example, where they built an alternative that pretends to be federated in order to capture refugees. But Bluesky is inevitably going to get fucked too and since it’s federated in pretense only, there isn’t another instance to take over. I think the process is similar to Linux adoption. It was always there, chugging along for people looking for alternatives. It hasn’t stopped growing. It hasn’t exploded but we’re not complaining about where we are, are we.
Avid Amoeba
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101·1 month agoSay what.
Still trying to pass Bluesky as federated I see.
Same here. It’s been a blast.
Did my part.
I see Saddam Hussein.
Also, we’re doing our part. They’re still halfway from their nodest goal though.
Do they have the equivalent for Lemmy?
E: Found it using Kagi… It just wasn’t turned on for me.
We can’t stop sovereign countries from banning services. We can however have external Fediverse services not comply with cutting off access to users from those sovereign countries, leaving it up them to ensure their citizens don’t have access. Since we’re not making off of doing business in those countries we can ignore non-legal requests instead of voluntarily complying. Then some of the more technical people in such places could use the existing tools for blocking circumvention in order to access the Fediverse if they really want to.
Apart from running many instances which keeps copies of other communities which happens automatically when a user on an instance subscribes to a community; organize larger instances into well funded non-profits that can weather attacks. Lemmy.ca, sh.it.just.works and Lemmy.world already have non-profits formed. An example of what this could look like is the Wikimedia Foundation. Obviously won’t be as wealthy at least not in the short term.
Moderation, voting, there are options. My point is whatever the version is of a community or a thread on Lemmy on its host instance, nearly the same the version is on another Lemmy instance that federates with most of the same instances. If we consider just 2 instances federating with each other, and users have no blocklists, and all federation updates are perfectly transferred (no networking issues), then a community in one instance would look identical on the other. So would a thread. After moderation actions and all.
What you’re observing are different communities and different threads. The same community lemmy.world/c/news is roughly the same across most instances. A specific thread in some community in lemmy.ca is roughly the same when viewed from most instances. I imagine a wiki page would function like a thread in Lemmy. Any instance federating with most instances would see roughly the same version of the wiki page as the originating instance.
Hm, that’s not how Lemmy communities / threads tend to develop. Unless you’re considering the effects of defederation I guess.
That’s nice info, thanks! Do you know why the db difference?
Yeah, that makes sense for the defect class of performance problems. I’m more concerned with the inherent performance (compute) disadvantages of Python. Perhaps they wouldn’t matter, hard to know without load testing.
I didn’t downvote.
Yeah, this would be my concern as well if I had to run it. Sure Python apps can be fast and most time is spent in IO, not compute, and if you’re running a profitable operation the exact cost of compute might not matter much. However if you’re running a non-profit service and you want it to be as dirt cheap as possible so it can be free for most users, then the cost of compute very much does matter.
Sure but does the rate of growth matter? The post asks about recommending Piefed instead of Lemmy. I presume the point is that the number of Piefed users would grow if we did that. So whether a thread produces 10, 1000, or 10000 users in a day, the number of users would grow over time. Then I think the question remains, if my Piefed instance costs $10/mo to run today, would it cost $100 with 10000 users or $1000, or more, or less?
But how is that not a concern if you’re interested in attracting more users? You run an instance with 500 users. Some thread on Reddit explodes and you get 1000-10000 new users in a few days. If Piefed has poor scaling you might be unable to pay the bills for your now much larger instance. That’s not gonna be great for you or the new users.
We have data on what it costs to run a sizeable instance of Lemmy and it’s not a lot. How does Piefed compare? Anyone starting an instance who envisions it growing large has to contend with this question. Currently it seems it’s got a bit under 1000 users across under 10 servers.
There are now sizeable communities run on Lemmy instances that are reinforced by network effects. There needs to be a significant reason for them to migrate. To that point, the collective project is building communities away from corporate power, not software. The software is a tool to facilitate that. Lemmy has worked well so far in this regard. If someone can show that Piefed can work better and not cost significantly more, it’ll probably get adopted for new communities. If the difference is drastic, we may even see migrations from Lemmy.
Thanks 👍
Much more important than the enjoyable culture is the material aspect - how much work each developer has to do. Nice vibes help delay burnout but rarely eliminate it. Or they let it happen with a smile on the face.
Pay the developers instead, so they can reduce hours worked elsewhere, if you can. Or contribute code, if you can. This isn’t aimed at you personally, but anyone reading. I can’t contribute code but I can pay so I do that.