I don’t think the software matters much tbh. It’s about payment aggregation, search hit aggregation, and for some “prestige” substack writers, actually getting paid by the platform.

The attraction of substack for at least some writers is that substack actually pays their more popular or prestigious writers. I don’t know how many or whether there is a published list of them, but at least a few of them are getting paid rather well (6 figures/year or maybe more). If Substack is recruiting and paying Nazis, then that is of interest and concern. Most writers there aren’t getting paid by substack, though they may have readers who buy subscriptions. That is open to pretty much everyone and the fanfiction saying “don’t like, don’t read” works for me here. Saying Ghost is a more attractive platform because it has more censorship is kind of a head scratcher. And calling Taibbi and Greenwald Nazis is ridiculous. Disliking the Democrats doesn’t make someone into a Nazi.

That said, I don’t personally like substack very much and am always glad to hear about alternatives.

https://old.lemmy.world/ looks just like reddit. It’s not the UI. It’s network effect and there’s not a lot to be done.

Right, like the other person says, Lemmy fundamentally doesn’t work like that. IDK what Piefed is. Ironically, in a sense, 4chan was ahead of us by decades.

If it’s what it sounds like, I understand it and would want it shut down too.

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I don’t understand how it’s worse for the guy in the truck though. I’ve never used Snapchat so I’m likely missing something.

MMS?

They don’t have email? It’s like the 1980s when only nerds had email.

Yeah I just mean that if you want a bullhorn, even if you don’t order it from Amazon, you still donate training data to Amazon every time you use it. Obviously you might have to do that anyway, but there is a trade-off. You can’t completely escape.

There is some discussion of that idea here:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/#praxis

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IDK, I’m here on Lemmy basically as a refugee from Reddit, but the federation angle doesn’t seem to help much from what I can tell. Look at how fast Bluesky overtook Mastodon. Anyway, anyone putting up new fanfic servers without understanding the politics and drama behind the existing ones is probably in for some pain. There used to be a saying “you’re looking for a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem”.

Yes I use lemmy.ml sometimes, but stay mostly on .world by inertia. It doesn’t make much difference. It does matter where the communities are. c/vegan is big and active and it’s on .world. The catfood incident there didn’t affect me directly (I’m not a subscriber) but it affected all the participants, many of whom are on other servers. So it’s not enough for users to move from .world. Communities would have to move or split as well. The federation model is that .world exports its censorship to every server that federates with it.

In fact, community fragmentation is already a huge fediverse fail even without censorship causing even more fragmentation.

This false equivalency pains me to my core. I don’t really have anything to say about the rest of your comment, but ffs can people stop with this nonsense take? You’re implying that the difference between centralized corporate authoritarianism and decentralized grassroots democracy is negligible.

It might very well be that the corporate censors are worse human beings than the Lemmy censors. That is completely independent of which platform experiences more censorship. It’s literally against the Lemmy World terms of service to discuss unsanctioned brands of cat food without supplying scientific sources. That nailed Lemmy’s coffin shut for me. There is nothing like that on Reddit. It’s ok, I’m not trapped in here with you. You’re trapped in here with me.

@Teknevra, you’ve posted a number of ideas like this which seem based on the premise that all it would take to make them happen is writing the software and keeping the servers running. In fact those are really the easy parts.

Any above-ground platform involving user to user payments (Patreon, Paypal etc.) has to devote a ton of energy into anti-fraud, anti-money-laundering, trade in illegal goods, etc. AO3 isn’t just file hosting for fanfiction, it’s explicitly political in that it aims to give a safe space for works that would be banned on other platforms due to subject matter that draws disapproval. That takes a lot of ideological commitment and some level of moderation, legal backing, etc. Pulling non-fediverse sites into the fediverse when they desire to run their own walled gardens for whatever reasons is another set of battles to fight. So in each case, the obstacles to your idea involve conflicts between humans, not just lack of the right software.

Why do you find the fediverse so great anyway? Lemmy is basically a failure IMHO. Instead of having one giant jerk censoring things like on Reddit, there are instead dozens of little petty ones wanting to defederate from other instances. Reddit is mostly a superior experience for users, with just a few of us fringe types staying on Lemmy because of priorities that almost nobody else cares about. Mastodon gained some popularity when Twitter became an intolerable hellhole, but Bluesky ended up recapturing a lot of those departing users.

I appreciate your good intentions and willingness to help out with various annoying situations, but I think it’s important to stay clear-headed about exactly what you are trying to do.

Why would you want that? What is the attraction? “Federate all the things” isn’t really an answer. Why would authors or readers prefer it over AO3?