And that’s within your right too. It goes both ways.

You can already donate to the people operating this instance. No subscriptions needed, just donate away.

Just because something’s not corporate owned doesn’t mean bad actors can come onto this platform. I’ve seen some unsavory people here already.

That’s because Mastodon is a federated Twitter clone. If you never used Twitter to begin with (which is really for professionals/celebrities/famous people to put out public messages to people), then you won’t get it. Most people don’t need to use Twitter or anything like it.

There’s peer pressure going on right now encouraging Mastodon instance owners not to federate with Meta’s Threads. How is that not gatekeeping?

But that choice should be up to instance owners and people shouldn’t pressure them either way. It’s their instance, after all, not yours.

I’m going to go against the grain here and say that there’s a lot of gatekeeping and shaming going on, especially against the Mastodon owners who are thinking about federating with Meta’s instance.

Federating with Meta’s servers should be a choice. If people want the ability to interact with celebrities and normies, that would be a huge boost to ActivityPub and Mastodon in general, especially for the servers that do end up federating with Meta. Their users would be able to interact and follow all of the mainstream people who are not on Mastodon.

It should be always be a choice. And for those servers that don’t federate, things will remain the same. Don’t try to gatekeep or spread FUD, it just makes you look paranoid and insular.

Yeah hopefully we get past the shitpost/meme stage which seems to be taking over here right now.

Isn’t it called BitTorrent?

Yeah but Reddit has 18 years of history and content behind it. So you will always find something worth reading. Here, I’m losing interest quickly. Memes are boring, I want to see some substantive discussion about something I don’t know anything about - something which Reddit and its userbase still excels at.

Well, bugs and UI aside, it seems like Lemmy can work but there’s not a lot of substantive discussion right now. The most upvoted stuff are memes and other low effort content. I’m not sure how long a bean meme can sustain serious activity.

Centralization reduces friction. Normies who sign up on Mastodon are going to want to be able to talk to all of the other Twitter refugees too. By making mastodon.social the default, it encourages centralization of the mainstream portion of Mastodon’s userbase, such as journalists, official company accounts, public figures, etc.

But most of them are probably going to use BlueSky. I heard journalists have been mostly gravitating towards that option.

It’s because normies want that “centralized” experience. They don’t want to figure out which servers are federated with which server - but they always know that they will have the least issues with the server that has the most active users.

If only we could crowdfund billions per month for a video site run by the community for the community!

Yeah but then you run into the risk of federation/defederation politics. We’ve already have had a major instance defederate.

I disagree. The large Mastodon instances have managed to survive for a while on donations. I haven’t seen a large Mastodon instance go kaput (though you can correct me if I’m wrong).

I would add that the risk of joining a small server is that the owner can suddenly delete them at any time and you would have to start all over again elsewhere. Best thing to do is to make an account on the large instances only.

Federation is a double-edged sword. Right now, anyone can spin up a Lemmy instance and federate with most other instances by default. Moderation is very important, especially in a federated environment. Otherwise Nazis and tankies will troll and spam and destroy the community we are trying to build. Conservatism is ok, but extremism is not.

Also FYI, be careful posting on Lemmy.ml communities - the people who run it are tankies and will brook no criticism of China or Russia, whether in the context of the war in Ukraine or not.

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