I think there is a spectrum between what you did (you were mod until you no longer thought that the pain of dealing with Reddit was worth it or morally justified) and someone who sticks around as a mod of 50+ subreddits because they see as an instrument of control, or someone that keeps running a big Mastodon instance despite financial struggles; and my point is to understand where most people lie.
No, I missed it before.
My “axe to grind” is not against mods. My “axe to grind” is against Small Fedi. I can elaborate more later if you want, but now I need to get back to work…
I legitimately did it because I had been a member of the community for years and really felt passionate about keeping its standards and making sure it remained safe for the community.
Would you do it for a community you didn’t care about?
Do you think that doing something because you “really felt passionate about it” is “selfless”?
It is a broader issue, namely: there is no such thing as doing a “thankless” job for purely altrustic reasons. This is not an issue on a small scale, but once it reaches it some critical mass we should wonder what motivates those who keep a position of authority.
(And before I get another barrage of people saying “I do it because I care about it/ I want to help / someone needs to do it”… yeah, sure, but if you are cultivating something because you happen to like the thing at hand , then you are doing for your own personal interest and it is not entirely altruistic. And that is totally fine.)
it gives them personal satisfaction to help out with something that is meaningful to them.
What about the cases where “what is meaningful to them” conflicts with “what is meaningful to the others”?
I said on a sibling comment but it bears repeating: I am not talking about someone who enjoys a hobby and goes on to create/mod a community about it. I am thinking about the cases where someone finds themselves as part of a large community and realizes that the majority of the members keep pushing you to things you either don’t want to or disagree with.
I have to ask, then: what motivates people to do it?
If mods are not financially compensated for it, the only rational explanation is that they are either getting some form of benefit (soft power, access to privileged information) or they are getting some pleasure out of it, i.e, power tripping.
Thank you. I wouldn’t take it hard evidence of anything, but I did miss the part where he was actually a mod on Reddit as well.
That is what their mod was accused of having done
He was accused of lots of things. But was there any concrete evidence of that? All I saw was a comment from reddit where he said something stupid.
AFAIK, it goes something like this:
I’m having trouble parsing your sentence. Do you mean that the mods/admins of fosstodon were using their position of power to suppress anyone?
C2S has a very specific usage, and if you meant “regular clients”, you’d do better by qualifying the API you were talking about by specifying the application - i.e, Mastodon, Lemmy - than by throwing a meaningless term.
c2s api like most other bots
Maybe you mean “bots using the ad-hoc APIs from the servers”? AFAIK, there is no server implementing C2S ActivityPub, so it would be hard to have bots making use of them?
There were more things that I had planned, such as the ability to do one-click repost of interesting links, but I didn’t get to it because that would mean effectively that I would have to turn the fediverser site into a an alternative Lemmy frontend.
I really wish more people had taken on the “Community Ambassador” work that I’ve done for https://fediverser.network/. It could be really helpful in creating a focal point for everyone that wanted to help the migration of people interested in a specific niche.
She touches on the aspect of monetization and claims that “you could save money by being on the Fediverse”.
Yes, in theory it is possible. In practice this is something that only is available for the already-famous journalists who have enough pull to move their audience from Substack to their own property.
For everyone else, the Fediverse is (a) too small and (b) too “anti-money” to encourage professionals to even try making a living here. They stay on Substack for the same reason that video creators stay on YouTube: it’s a horrible master, but at least it lets them pay their bills.
these companies are at the whim of the large oligopolies
Why? We are talking about FOSS and services based on FOSS, here. Do you think that Google would be able to successfully shut down small email providers without repercussions?
pose absolutely no threat to them
Why is that relevant? I do not particularly care about eliminating the large corporations, at least not from the start. I’d be more than happy if we could grow this ecosystem here to become a sizable share of the overall market.
I’d rather work towards a world where Facebook has “only” 70% of the market to themselves and the rest of us foment a healthy economy sustaining the other 30%, than to keep this delusional idea that a scrappy bunch of nerds are going to be able to take Lemmy/Mastodon/PixelFed/Matrix/XMPP to the mainstream by wishful thinking and “community” alone.
A “cockroach business” is something that has no significant revenue but at the same time takes up so little resources that can be operated forever. This is completely different from, e.g, small email hosting providers like Migadu or some agency that gets real customers to make wordpress customizations.
There’s a difference between an instance trying to duplicate all of fucking reddit
With botsin.space, we have a good example of what is reasonable to not be defederated
We also have a good example of an instance that is dead. There is no point in giving that as an example, if no one can actually use it.
Wait, not only are you misinterpreting what I said (I used alien.top as a case of for “admins will want to defederate because of resource abuse even when their own users find it useful” and less about “admins will ban any bot-only instance”) but your interpretation directly contradicts your first point.
Yeah, you can add the “reasonable output” qualifier all you want. This would be a subjective point. I for one think that a fleet of 98 bots posting each once a day is not even worth of consideration, but clearly some disagree and are willing to treat the guy as “toxic”.
Nothing can be easier than going to https://portal.alien.top/, signing up with your Reddit account and seeing your account already subscribed to communities corresponding to your favorite subreddits.