Just passing through.
Seems to be some misunderstanding somewhere - Jerry states elsewhere that the costs are covered by donations.
The Mastodon instance I’m on has around 200 people (not all of them active), and received around €800 in donations last year,. Total costs were less than €300.
I think the problem of scaling kicks in when we go after demographics that are less charitable on average.
the flagship instance of Bandwagon.fm will be taking 0% of any money musicians make.
Good stuff.
To support development, Bandwagon’s flagship instance will be offering a $10 per month Premier plan that allows musicians to sell their music and offer their tracks at a higher bit-rate, among other features.
So they will take 0% of money, except a flat fee of €10 every month in order to be allowed to sell music at all? This seems a bit more problematic, as smaller artists would lose money every month by trying to position themselves in the market.
I like the business model of selling subscriptions to the artists but giving them 100% of proceedings quite a lot, but it would be nice if they for example only had to pay a monthly fee once sales surpassed €10, or if they could sell a limited amount of tracks for free in order to test the waters before putting all their music out for sale.
Writing this comment listening to @[email protected] by the way. Recommended to anyone interested in German singer/songwriter music. Who isn’t.
I get the pleasure of hanging out in well moderated communities where I feel like I am doing my part. Doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.
It seems some users have some sort of group functionality and have had it for “quite a while”, but I don’t see it myself so couldn’t test it.
But yeah, groups in Pixelfed have been “just around the corner” for a while now.
There are very recent updates. Judging from this comment, some users seem to have some sort of grup support already.
I don’t see it on my Pixelfed instance. I’m not sure if that’s because it’s still on v0.12.4 (not the newest v0.12.5), or because it needs to be enabled by the admin. I also have no idea how it currently works.
People keep giving the advice of following hashtags. That might be good advice for really obscure ones where you’re almost guaranteed to be interested in anything posted, but I think it’s terrible advice generally.
Follow users, and hide their boosts or unfollow them if it turns out they make your feed less interesting.
Really good write-up.
RE: Too many cooks:
And that means people who are more likely to be harassed also end up having to do more of the work to prevent harassment.
This is true and a genuine problem, but also a lot better than the alternative, which is the commercial platforms where nobody gives a shit about them and they are harassed on a daily basis with nothing much they can do about it.
On Twitter, community notes were hailed as a success for giving the Community an entirely toothless form of moderation. On the Fediverse, the community has been given real teeth.
RE: Guilt by association
This has happened with several beneficial alternative technologies in the past, such as peer-to-peer file sharing, the dark web and end-to-end encryption.
Nice reminder to spread the word about the wonders of P2P, Tor, and E2EE. Some people will always believe in the propaganda of the capitalists and the authoritarians seeking to undermine these technologies, but they are all very much alive and well, and I think most people are fine with the idea of having their nude selfies or whatever protected under E2EE.
Likewise, for sure Elon Musk will try to tell people the fediverse is full of pedos. Coming from him, that puts us in the same club as that diver who saved a bunch of children in a cave in Thailand. So in that sense I guess the point about commercial capture is more relevant: I’m more worried when people like Musk pretend to be our friends. But in all honesty, I’m not very worried about that either. I still rock an entirely independent e-mail provider, even after everything Microsoft and Google has done to undermine that technology.
If you want to look at things from a different angle, you could also consider signing up for Mbin (fedia.io, kbin.earth) or PieFed (piefed.social, feddit.online).
I guess it might make sense for some people, not for others. It does allow you to see things from a little bit of a different angle, especially in the all feed.
In November last year, Bluesky had more than 3 million daily users in the US alone. According to fedidb, the Fediverse as a whole has 1.5 million monthly users globally.
Here’s a Peertube mirror, timestamped at the shout-out to Mastodon and Peertube:
https://peertube2.cpy.re/w/rq6WfwnQTiHfpoWhURLNBS?start=25m14s
Lemmy does not normally display microblog content from Mastodon. You cannot follow users and see their posts listed on their profile or elsewhere, and as a result you cannot see or comment on their posts either.
Mastodon users can, however, tag a community on Lemmy the same way they can tag a user. If they do so, their post will appear as a thread in the tagged Lemmy community, and Lemmy users will be able to respond to them.
Mastodon users can basically pop up in the comment section any time, should they stumble over it for some reason or another. This could happen in many different ways: They could follow a hashtag, someone could share (boost) content into their feed, they could be mentioned, or they could read the Lemmy community and manually open the thread in Mastodon to reply.
If this is serious, you consider these people friends, and you honestly don’t see the problem with your communication here, you have two options when you receive a text message:
Leaving voice messages is a potential third option, if you’re capable of expressing yourself like that.
It seems people are interested in talking to you, but you are clearly not cut for written communication. With responses like this they might not be interested in talking to you in person after either.
If you don’t feel like talking due to depression, consider telling them about this. Probably in person. Like “Hey, I’m a bit depressed, so when we meet up and hang out it takes a lot of effort from me and the stars pretty much need to align. I’m super happy to do it, but I can’t always gather the strength to. So when I’m pretty shit at texting it’s because I struggle to gather that kind of energy out of nowhere. It’s nothing personal.”
It has gotten really, really good for photography. There’s a bunch of incredible photographers posting their stuff on the Fediverse these days, and they enjoy the appeal of it that it’s closer to what Instagram was before it became an influencer hub.
As for random cats and dogs, I guess some people enjoy that as well.
I would be worried that when the scammers in charge dump their holdings, the resulting turmoil will affect other currencies as well. Demand-based markets don’t respond well nor rationally to panic.
That said, I also think the whole thing is a ponzi, and my understanding is of course affected by that. But I believe the logic above would apply in either case.
As the current us government is very pro crypto, I’d say this is not only very risky, but you would also be buying into their narrative and possibly be an even greater part of it as it crashes and burns.
That said, you’re not wrong.
I’d say it depends on your uses.
If you’re an organization looking for a platform in which to publish your videos so that they can be spread in your newsletter/social media and embedded on your website, it’s probably a very good alternative.
If you’re a content creator who runs on donations and has a dedicated following already, it might be good. And as the fediverse grows, it will only get better.
For a lot of the content creators who live off engagement and clicks, it’s much less likely to become a viable alternative. The kind of content people will watch for hours, but that nobody would ever consider paying for.
I think it’s not about one platform replacing all of YouTube, but about providing viable alternatives for specific uses.
They’ve fixed it now by the way, after someone contacted them about it. :)
I think it’s cool that someone who knows nothing about Mastodon is even writing about this. Though I would wish journalists had the time to double check just a little bit more.
I think (!) the idea is that I could text you using your fediverse handle, and that it could somehow become integrated in other fediverse services.
It makes sense through the following storyline:
I have no idea if it’ll be good or if it’ll be used. I struggle enough to get people on Signal. But if it can somehow provide E2EE while benefiting from the social graph of ActivityPub, it might not be the dumbest thing ever.
Ironically I’m using a free trial of Kagi.
Paid for the limited plan before, but had not nearly enough searches and got annoyed by the unrolling integration of AI. Happy to be back now, but still not sure about it.
$10 per month is not nothing at all, and if I’m not somewhat confident I am ideologically aligned with Kagi I’ll be reluctant to spend so much money on it. I’d rather sponsor open source projects and other things I believe in.
On the positive side Mastodon is working on a fix.