An overdue blog post about the finances and other news from the .world

  • @nicoweio@lemmy.world
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    19310 months ago

    I’m actually surprised how low the server costs are. Granted, the userbase is not that large, but it makes me optimistic that Lemmy.world survives long-time.

  • @OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
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    12910 months ago

    Legendary. Didn’t realize the Lemmy world team was also running Mastodon and Firefish instances. Much love for your determined support!

  • @maegul@lemmy.ml
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    10 months ago

    Non profit foundation is awesome to see. It will probably the general structure of all significant long lasting institutions on the Fedi.

  • @drrlvn@lemmy.world
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    6510 months ago

    I might be out of the loop so I’m genuinely curious - what’s wrong with Cloudflare?

    The post mentions several times that it isn’t popular and that an alternative will be found.

  • wilberfan
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    4210 months ago

    I’m loving the transparency around here. 👍

  • kersploosh
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    3610 months ago

    Y’all are wonderful. Thanks for your dedicated effort.

    I also appreciated your shout-out to other instances that are active cooperating with .world to make Lemmy a better place. Teamwork makes the dream work.

  • godless
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    10 months ago

    The idea of a non-profit holding sounds great, but what about collateral damage if shit really hit the fan? Would it not be smarter to have a separate entity for each platform? They could all have essentially the same statutes, boards, directors etc. etc., so in case if one really got under heavy fire, the others wouldn’t be affected? I know it means more admin work and probably also requires some governing policies with regards to the funding distribution, but might be cleaner in the end.

    • Obinice
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      910 months ago

      This is absolutely the correct thing to do. Do not place all your eggs in one legal basket.

      • @benoit@lemmy.world
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        310 months ago

        Won’t that be an administrative nightmare though? N times the number of income tax declarations etc?

  • Lugh
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    2810 months ago

    I wonder why Mastodon.world has done so comparatively poorly. I also wonder if Mastodon could be more integrated with Lemmy would that improve things. As awful as twitter is these days, the way it embeds so easily into other content, which lets you click straight to its comments is invaluable. No doubt its on Elon’s list of things to ruin, and he’ll get around to it eventually.

    • Ghostalmedia
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      4010 months ago

      mastodon.social dominates for one simple reason. The Mastodon gGmbH app now defaults to mastodon.social sign ups.

      Selecting instances was confusing the shit out of people, so they relented and simplified the signup process.

      • @JWBananas@startrek.website
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        10 months ago

        What is gGmbH?

        The gGmbH is a non-profit company with limited liability under German law. In German this is gemeinnützige Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung – gGmbH for short. Here ‘non-profit’ (gemeinnützig) means that the purpose of the company is to benefit the common good.

      • @imperator3733@lemmy.world
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        910 months ago

        That’s unfortunate.

        Instead of requiring an insurance selection or defaulting to one specific instance, perhaps they could have a handful of moderate/large instances that the app randomly selects between when a user signs up. That would spread out the signups from people who don’t understand the instances.

        • RuudM
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          1110 months ago

          Yes, that’s the plan. But determining which instances are suitable isn’t easy… I’ll ask them what’s the status on this.

    • @Salix@sh.itjust.works
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      10 months ago

      I also wonder if Mastodon could be more integrated with Lemmy would that improve things.

      This won’t happen. The Lemmy dev does not want Mastodon to be integrated into Lemmy. They say that plenty of other fediverse software already has this implemented, and that Lemmy doesn’t need to reinvent what other software does.

      • Lugh
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        10 months ago

        The Lemmy dev does not want Mastodon to be integrated into Lemmy.

        Something tells me this isn’t the last word on the issue. If the fediverse concept is to succeed, then its two (current) largest players need to have some cross-functionality.

        Perhaps the fediverse will get big enough that third-party developers will step in to fix this. Twitter & Reddit both benefitted hugely from the extra functionality third-party developers enhanced both platforms with.

        Its anathema to the whole concept of the fediverse that one person - a lemmy dev - gets to decide something so important.

        • godless
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          810 months ago

          Something tells me this isn’t the last word on the issue. If the fediverse concept is to succeed, then its two (current) largest players need to have some cross-functionality.

          I strongly disagree here. They might be using the same protocol, but the user expectations are something completely different. I’ve tried mastodon and really don’t get the appeal, just like I never understood why people want something like Twitter. And I’m sure there are some Mastodon users out there who can’t be bothered about Lemmy.

          Forcing them into one common framework feels like alienating both to me.

        • PeleSpirit
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          810 months ago

          It honestly takes some of the fun out of it, I really thought there would be more cross-communication.

          • @ikilledlaurapalmer@lemmy.world
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            1110 months ago

            They do different things. Microblog/follow people vs discussion forum/follow topics. Just because they share a protocol doesn’t mean it’s compatible at a practical or desirable level. I wouldn’t want microblogging coming to Lemmy personally.

            • PeleSpirit
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              810 months ago

              But to have that choice would be great even though you personally don’t like it. I would switch to kbin if I didn’t already really like world.

        • @Salix@sh.itjust.works
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          10 months ago

          Its anathema to the whole concept of the fediverse that one person - a lemmy dev - gets to decide something so important.

          I should have clarified that it’s 2 devs, Nutomic & Dessalines.

          I am unsure if their political views have any affect on being the ones wanting to decide on important things like that. I know that they are both openly communist, and they both have Fidel Castro as their profile picture.

          Perhaps the fediverse will get big enough that third-party developers will step in to fix this.

          Unless they can convince the devs to integrate, I believe the third-party developers would have to fork the project and convince Lemmy instances to switch to their fork. From there, the third-party developers might change the name from Lemmy to something else.

        • Dick Justice
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          110 months ago

          I keep coming back to imagining if Reddit and Twitter were integrated. It just sounds like a giant mess. I guess I’m just not sure what the benefit would be, or why anyone would want it. What’s the actual use case that makes it desirable?

      • NebLem
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        110 months ago

        The existing integration works suprisingly well given the different use cases. Bettet than Masto and Peertube.

        Unfortunately Mastodon not supporting group actors is the main difficulty in the integration on its end. Lemmy has hacks like auto-boosting thread posts, but kbin and peertube don’t so you can’t get thread posts without following the post author.

        I think allowing user following (allow subscribing to user pages) and handling tags (which I’m not sure the right approach, probably can fit in whatever multicommunity feature gets developed) are the only missing things on the Lemmy side.

    • RxBrad
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      1310 months ago

      I also wonder if Mastodon could be more integrated with Lemmy would that improve things.

      I still don’t understand why so many people want to cram that square peg into that round hole.

      Much like I never wanted my Reddit & Twitter mixed together… Lemmy & Mastodon just seem so incompatible to want to smoosh them together.

      Yes kbin sort of does it, but it’s basically like two totally different worlds that happen to share a common account.

    • @sliels@sh.itjust.works
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      1210 months ago

      If you want that you can check out Kbin. It’s like Lemmy but also has a microblogging section that relatively flawlessly integrates mastodon content.

      • loobkoob
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        310 months ago

        +1 for kbin (which I am commenting from). I initially chose kbin because I liked the UI more than Lemmy’s, but I’ve come to really appreciate the fact that it supports microblogging as well.

    • RuudM
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      410 months ago

      What did mastodon.world do poorly?

        • RuudM
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          810 months ago

          Ah OK. Yeah lemmy had a big growth past months. Mastodons growth is mostly absorbed by .social

    • jarfil
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      110 months ago

      @Lugh @lwadmin
      > I also wonder if Mastodon could be more integrated with Lemmy

      They’re already quite integrated, in the sense that users can interact between both platforms. What further integration did you have in mind?

      • Lugh
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        110 months ago

        Maybe I’m missing something, when I try to interact with Mastodon from futurology.today there’s zero ability to interact. It seems to give the option to send DMs, but when I test it, they never arrive.

  • @lycanrising@lemmy.world
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    2410 months ago

    i’m thrilled to see that the donations are letting this be somewhat self sustaining. obviously a lot of unpaid volunteering going into this so not quite a self sustaining non profit, but it’s got all the promising signs

  • Sean
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    2010 months ago

    Thank you for all the work you guys do! Glad to see server expenses are coming in under budget of the donations!

  • @sturlabragason@lemmy.world
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    2010 months ago

    Great work! Although I’m far too busy with other stuff I’d love to be able to contribute some Terraform when and where I can. Maybe you could put some stuff in a public repo so we might contribute?

    • Jelloeater
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      1510 months ago

      The stuff in our repo is quite sensitive, so probably won’t ever be public. If your interested in helping. Feel free to fill out a application. It’s in the side bar on the home page. 😎

      • @sturlabragason@lemmy.world
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        1010 months ago

        Alright I will. Just didn’t want to commit to it and then ending up having zero time.

        In my experience usually your sensitive stuff should be hidden in secrets so public repos usually shouldn’t be too much of a hassle.

  • Nine
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    1610 months ago

    Love it! I’m happy to keep supporting this endeavor and community.

    So from one sysadmin to another great job! Keep it up and I can’t wait to see where this goes! 🍻

  • Dick Justice
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    10 months ago

    Out of curiosity, why is Cloudflare so heavily despised? It sounds like the service works well?